Input wanted

Rich66 · 11-09-2009, 02:38 PM

What do you think about a treatment involving Taxotere and a number of drugs, 2 treatments, for mbc with these stats?
31 patients
29 responders (50% reduction)
15 patients developed brain mets

Obviously it's all good up until brain mets are mentioned. It's data that isn't usually included and it shocked me. If the first phase of the tx doesn't show immediate improvement, the treatment is cancelled.
There are a number of ways to look at things and I would like to gather some.

Becky · 11-09-2009, 03:47 PM

In general, the stats for brain mets seems really high. I always thought that 25% - 30% of Her2+ metastatic patients would eventually wind up with brain mets. However, the longer survival times of Her2+ patients due to new therapies (Herceptin and Tykerb etc) do allow for brain mets to develop since many chemos and therapies do not pass the blood brain barrier.

There's not much info to really go on otherwise.