HERA and FinHER studies results to be updated at next week's St Gallen conference

[Lani]

So says Dr Unch at this week's Miami Breast Cancer Conference...

Perhaps the results of 1 vs 2 years' Herceptin?

Stay tuned...

[Becky]

Thanks so much for this information. Especially the 1 vs 2 yrs of adjuvant Herceptin. Perfect timing for some of the people on this board that are still in adjuvant treatment!

[schoolteacher]

Lani,

Was the conference this week or is it next week?

Amelia

[Mary Anne in TX]

Can't wait to hear these results! ma

[Lani]

the St. Gallen conference begins next week

[Christine MH-UK]

It will be interesting to see how these trials have panned out.

[jones7676]

Thanks as always Lani!

[Joan M]

Lani,

I've been thinking about the FinHER trail and wondering whether early stage bc patients will be able to have a shorter course of Herceptin that would be just as effective.

If so it would be great news for bc patients, but bad news for Genentech which is now involved in a hostile takeover by Roche.

Joan

[Lani]

Doesn't look like this meeting has podcasts so I will have to look for press-releases, etc.

[Christine MH-UK]

http://www.docguide.com/news/content.nsf/news/852571020057CCF6852575780065EE72

This is pretty raw stuff, pretty much a straight abstract, but I will see if I can make it a bit simpler. I hope Lani will correct anything that I have gotten wrong.

The interesting findings:
* Taxotere was clearly better than vinorelbine for early BC.
* The reduction in overall mortality in the group that got herceptin and taxotere was 58% in the Finher protocol.
* There seems to have a been a big and significant reduction in distant mets when herceptin was used with taxotere. The abstract is written in such a confusing manner that I struggled with it, but I think the risk of distant mets was reduced by about half. There was a significant improvement in distant disease free survival.
* The herceptin-treated group did not have more heart problems than the control group.

Questions left unanswered:
* There was no confidence interval provided for the hazard reduction in the abstract, so it is impossible to know what the margin of error on the recurrence reduction is to compare it to other trials. This is a particularly important omission given the relatively small size of the trial.
* Why they used distant disease free survival instead of the more usual disease free survival.
* There were no confidence intervals or p values given for the overall improvement in survival, which probably means that this trial has not yet demonstrated that herceptin significantly improves mortality, but updated figures on this are also missing from four year HERA results as well. Maybe it is all those her2-positive women with secondaries living a long time on herceptin complicating things!

I guess we will have to wait until it is published for more answers.

[Debbie L.]

Christine, thanks for this. I agree, it's jumbled - you did a good job trying to translate. And it's a newsperson's interpretation of the abstract. I wish that the website for this conference had some information.

The information about Herceptin (except at the end, talking about cancer-free survival) did have significance - they gave the p-values and those were okay, right?

We've been spoiled by SABCS and ASCO and their nearly real-time reports, huh?

Debbie Laxague

[Christine MH-UK]

The only p-value given was for distant disease free survival, but it would meet a standard 5% cutoff. P equalled .029 for adding herceptin to taxotere, so there was less than a 3% chance that the increase in distant disease free survival was a fluke.

You're right, Debbie, it was probably a journalist's interpretation of the abstract, which explains some of the weirdness of it. If that was the case, the lack of confidence intervals might just be down to a tight deadline. I would hope that a medical professional would pay more attention to confidence intervals. Well, at least someone bothered to write about the results for this trial, so we should be thankful for that.

In my experience, Europe generally just tends to be more secretive about things than America is, which may help to explain why the abstracts are not more freely available. Of course, St Gallen is in Switzerland, which has a reputation for being especially secretive.