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Not at all!
Are you pre-,peri- or postmenopausal?
Her2 neu people would appear to do best with an aromatase inhibitor --in the neoadjuvant setting Matthew Ellis (I believe it is one of the articles in the list of 20) gave letrozole with herceptin to her2positive estrogen receptor positive patients before surgery and saw it work rather well.
Aromatase inhibitors are not given in pre-or peri-menopausal women, because their effect is to
rob the body of whatever estrogen it still produces after the ovaries no longer make estrogen.
If you are pre or perimenopausal, your doctor may insist you have your ovaries removed or
that you take shots of a compound that makes your pituitary no longer send messages to your ovary to make estrogen (and other things), before giving you an aromatase inhibitor. If you do either of those, you will be a candidate to take aromatase inhibitors, which seem to work better than tamoxifen and with fewer side effects (although they haven't been used by large numbers of people for as long as tamoxifen has).
Herceptin monotherapy (that is, when it is given alone) is generally much less effective when it is given with something else. So far the only something else they give it with is chemotherapy.
You did not say if you have positive nodes, a large tumor, or metastases so I assumed you had early breast cancer and were looking into these things to prevent it from coming back.
I also assumed that you were her2positive AND estrogen and or/progesterone receptor
positve. It is felt that even when her2positive tumors are estrogen positive, that they are only weakly estrogen positive with a small number of receptors, even if they might be a rather larger percentage of receptors. (ARTICLE BY KOPECNY). It remains unclear what is the best treatment for them. I hope the ASCO meeting will address this group of patients.
Hope this helped,
Lani
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