Hi Bevie, the report from 2004 was an endocrinology report but that was the only part that referred to HER2's and there was no matching breakdown of the characteristics just for the HER2's
Many studies are done on the main group of bc patients and so are counted in terms of the whole group, and not broken down further into the different kinds of HER2 positives or negatives.
Whether or not it is true, there is some information indicating that a large number of the HER2's that do recur, do so within the first 3 years, and some people think that by the time a clinical trial was offered and completed, the only ones who would benefit from the results would be those who happened to get whatever treatment actually worked in the trial because everybody else that was still around would have made it past those 3 years.
There are some of us and some oncologists and researchers who do think a clinical trial should be offered.
I am HER2+++ and one of those left out. I think it is wrong to think that there are not enough people to benefit from a clinical trial. For one thing, they learned enough from the Herceptin trials to make some important decisions early enough in the clinical trial to change therapy for everyone and help more people, so that could be also true for a trial for us too. I also do not believe they have enough truly accurate data from the past about HER2 positives to decide that very few of us recur after the third year so "why bother with the many people from years past".
I see HER2's recurring often enough after 3 years in various support groups that I have to disagree with those who are writing us off. I also think it would be important to figure out whether some combination of chemo-plus-Herceptin is better than Herceptin alone, especially if the combo were given short-term and compared to longer-term Herceptin alone.
A.A.
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