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Thank you Margerie! That's very interesting. Useful for this discussion as far as percent of all cancer that is any particular subtype. And I'm surprised to see that of the HER2+'s, the larger group is ER+ (11.4% both, 3.5%ER+PR-), while the ERPR-, HER2+ group is smaller (7.2%). Doesn't that seem wrong? These are from 60K women, though, and I don't know why California wouldn't be representative. This kind of data is probably available from SEER also but I don't have time to look right now. (and again, we'd want to what the cut-off was for declaring positive or negative hormone receptor status, and what test determined this).
As for recurrence or survival, we can't learn much from this. It is for 5-year survival, pre-Herceptin. What I learn from it, personally, is another confirmation that for me (ERPR-, HER2+, no Herceptin) - my risk of recurrence was most high early-on. In addition, I note that my subgroup is at the bottom of the pack, even below triple negative by a small bit. But again, this is only at 5 years and for survival - so we don't know how many people have recurred but are still alive at this point.
And those ERPR+HER2+'s are way up there for survival at 5 years, so this hasn't answered any of the questions about longer term survival for that group. If you look hazard ratios for recurrence that contrast ER- and ER+, you see that the first peaks higher and earlier and that when they get farther out - usually around 5-6 years, they cross and the ER+ line stays more constant (although quite low) while the ER- line wanders slowly down. Same shape of graph for HER2+ vs. HER2-, although I've seen some graphs where the HER2+ line goes almost to zero after 5 years (for recurrence). But I've never seen these broken down into more detail like what we're talking about in this thread (I love graphs - for me a graph is worth a thousand words). Again, as the adjuvant data matures we should have this.
And remember - this is just a mental exercise here. This is not telling any single person what will happen with them.
And Sassy - yes, not hearing from anyone is exactly what I'd hoped to have to report back to my friend. I had no idea we'd get into such an interesting discussion.
Debbie
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