Al, I agree, although I am not able to reference any studies which directly compare survival stats of Her2+/ Herceptin patients against the survival stats of the remaining MBC population; however, here's an excerpt from an interesting article (I've included the link to the complete article); the same article goes on to discuss RESPONSE rates to Herceptin therapy but doesn't show SURVIVAL rates for same....if we could just come up with some stats then we'd be able to cross reference with this article, as it discusses numerous chemo regimes, with overall survival rates included in quite a few. But anyone doing that should be careful they're cross-referencing the studies on breast cancer, as I think all types are referenced in this article.
Recent Advances in the Systemic Therapy of Breast Cancer
http://www.ochsnerjournal.org/ochsonline/?...ue=01&page=0024
Comparative Taxane Responses
Taxanes have shown significant activity compared with other standard chemotherapies. Bishop et al (19) compared P to the cyclophosphamide © methotrexate (M), 5 fluorouracil (F), and P combination (CMFP) in a randomized trial involving 209 patients, none of whom had been previously treated with chemotherapy for metastatic disease. Treatment with P alone demonstrated significantly longer median survival (17.3 months) compared with CMFP (13.9 months; p = 0.025).
In another phase III trial (20), docetaxel (100mg/m2) was compared with intensive single-agent D (75 mg/m2), both administered every 3 weeks. Docetaxel produced a significantly higher response rate (47.8% vs 33.3%; p = 0.008) with lower toxicity but no difference in survival.
Docetaxel has been compared with the combination of mitomycin C and vinblastine in metastatic breast cancer patients who failed prior anthracycline therapy. A significant survival advantage was seen in the docetaxel-treated patients (docetaxel 11.4 months, mitomycin C and vinblastine 8.7 months; p = 0.0097) (21).