[Lani]

for the sake of Alaska Angel and others node negative
This study was only done in node positive patients (interestingly because chemotherapy was recommended in the US to all invasive bc patients whether node negative or node positive)

I think that is why they are quoting 20,000 as the number of women who might avoid chemo--had they done the study includiing node negative patients and IF they got the same result, there would probably be four to five times as many women angry this morning.

Was that purposeful? Or did they just assume that the node negatives would be covered by the TAILOR RX study out in a few years (which really does not answer the same question as it uses a methodology/algorith derived on tamoxifen treated patients who received chemotherapy regimens which I don't believe are required to be identical).

So when repeating the study, be sure you know it counts only for node positive patients...but as node negative patients are considered less likely to recur than node positive patients (at least when looking at breast cancer as a whole vs subsets of it) it would seem that the absolute (vs relative) benefits/of lack of benefits of taxanes would be even smaller

How about now adding serum her2neu testing, bone marrow biopsies and/or Circulating tumor cell testing to the ER and her2 testing(and hopefully eventually gene expression profiling) to even better delineate who is most likely to recur/metastasize, thus treating those most likely to benefit and avoiding over treatment of those not likely to benefit (and more likely to have lifelong problems from the treatment)

Getting off my soapbox...

Hope this helped