recurrence after one year of herceptin in early breat cancer
 

Dear HER2 Group ,


I am very interesting to khnow the percentage of recurrence in early breast cancer after one year of adjuvant Herceptin .

I look forward to hearing from you .

Thank you for your cooperation .

Sincerely ,

VIVIANE

Good question
 

Anyone have a good answer to this question?

"After a median of one year of follow-up, patients who took trastuzumab for a year had a 46 percent reduction in the risk of breast cancer recurrence compared with patients who did not receive trastuzumab."

Rhonda

http://www.cancer.gov/clinicaltrials.../herceptin1005

BCIRG Study
 

Here is a link to the interim report from the BCIRG study presented in 2005.

http://www.bcirg.org/Internet/Studies/BCIRG+006.htm

It is difficult to give "the" answer to your question. Even if you evaluate many variables including tumor size, ER/PR/HER2 status, node involvement, etc. it is still a complicated numbers game.

Anyway, from the study above, at TWO years, the Disease Free Survival rate for chemo+herceptin is around 92%. Without herceptin, the DFS rate is 86%

At four years, the DFS rate for chemo+herceptin is between 80-84% (depending upon chemo regimen) with the non-herceptin group at 73%.

The number of deaths reported were 3.3% with chemo alone and 2.2% with chemo+herceptin (actual numbers were presented but I did the math).

Hi,

My onc said she felt it was an 11% chance of recurrence for early stage. She said this based on with surgery and radiation alone there's 30% recurrence. Chem knocks off another 10%, tamoxifen another 6 and herceptin another 5%. This is probably oversimplified, and may not account for HER2+ as I read recurrence for HER+ with surgery and radiation at 40%. In the end these are just numbers, and I hope they keep improving the meds. BB