How Can You Tell that Herceptin is Working?

[Maggie C]

Ladies -

I just completed 3+ months of Herceptin q 3 weeks after Taxotere/Herceptin completed in January. I had normalized CEA and CA 2729 since November. I'm thinking the Herceptin isn't working since my CEA is back up and I now have lung mets which weren't evident at the end of Taxotere.

Can anyone tell me about instances when Herceptin doesn't work? I assume this is not a dosing issue, but could it be? Should I have been on weekly Herceptin?

Thanks... Maggie

[aquinis2000]

here is a very informative thread about this subject

Attempting to increase rate of Herceptin efficacy,decrease rate of Hercptn resistance (http://her2support.org/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=22456&highlight=30%25) ( http://her2support.org/vbulletin/images/misc/multipage.gif 1 (http://her2support.org/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=22456&page=1&highlight=30%25) 2 (http://her2support.org/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=22456&page=2&highlight=30%25) 3 (http://her2support.org/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=22456&page=3&highlight=30%25) )
Lani


hope this helps,

[Lani]

If you had a baseline level before Herceptin and had it repeated after 10-21 days of Herceptin treatment a decrease of 25% or so was found in a large study of three or four different hospitals to indicate efficacy of Herceptin.
The paper, which I think I posted or referred to before had Dr. Slamon as one of the authors and the Charite Hospital in Berlin as one of the hospitals.

There is a lot of info on the Bayer test for serum her2 neu on this site.

Hope this helps!