[Joanne S]

Lani,
This one took me a really long time to find---is this the article you were attempting to post for us?

<OA bc friend of mine has brain metastisis so I felt compelled to find and read this article. I read this article three times. Perhaps I am missing something. My conclusion is that everyone’s bc characteristics are different and survival times vary from just a few days to years. The last sentence in the article says, ' Any or all of these characteristics might explain their potential for prolonged survival'.
</O
It would be so helpful if you would:
provide your personal interpretation of the article,
explain your intention/reason for sharing the article,
why you think the info contained in the article might be personally/individually important to us HER2ers,
does the info contained in the article potentially have a profound and beneficial effect on our cancer, life, prognosis, medical decisions, treatments, and mental health?
<O</O

PMID: 18058228 - Google serarch did not match any documents; however, I found this:
Received: 13 November 2007 Accepted: 14 November 2007
Published online: 4 December 2007
To the Editor,

We read with great interest the article by Lee et al. [1] in which
they analyzed retrospectively prognostic factors that affect clinical outcome of breast cancer patients with brain metastases.

The overall median survival time was 5.6 months.

In their study, 23.1% of patients survive more than 1 year.

However, they did not analyze prognostic factors of these long-term survivors, separately.

Recent retrospective study evaluated clinical data from 420 patients who had been diagnosed with breast cancer and brain metastasis between 1994 and 2004 at M. D. Anderson Cancer Center.

In this study median follow-up after brain metastasis was 6 months (range 0.7–95.9 months) and the overall median survival was 6.8 months [2].

Concerning long-term survivors in this study, 82 patients (19.5%) were alive at least 18 months after diagnosis of CNS metastasis. Of these 82 patients, 25 patients (30%) were HER2 positive.

Furthermore, 18 (4.2%) were alive at least 60 months after this diagnosis.

The median age of these relatively longer surviving patients was 42 years.

Compared to an unselected series of breast cancer patients, this longer surviving population was younger and predominantly premenopausal.

Most of these patients had tumors of ductal histologic type, T stage 1 or 2, N stage 0 or 1, and M0 stage at diagnosis.

About half of these patients had ER-positive or PR-positive disease, and 73% had grade III disease.

Forty-six percent of these patients had a single CNS metastasis.

Any or all of these characteristics might explain their potential for prolonged survival.

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http://www.springerlink.com/content/f0r3382p3k263863/fulltext.html