Aggressive Therapies Shown to Cure Breast Cancer
By Rob Stein, Washington Post, May 13, 2005

Chemotherapy and hormone treatment have dramatically reduced the death rate from early breast cancer, according to a major international analysis that indicates the often arduous regimens do cure many women. The latest data from an extensive ongoing project involving 145,000 women with early breast cancer found that chemotherapy and hormone treatment continue to protect many women from dying from the disease for at least 15 years. The protection often gets stronger over time, increasing the likelihood that the therapy is truly eradicating cancer from their bodies.

The findings provide the most convincing support yet for using aggressive strategies against the most common malignancy to strike women, and they help explain why the death rate from breast cancer has been dropping in many countries, including the United States and Britain, experts said. “The most impressive finding is the divergence of the survival curves for breast cancer over time,” wrote Karen Gelmon of the BC Cancer Agency in Vancouver, British Columbia, and colleagues in an editorial accompanying the findings. “The survival curves suggest that adjuvant systemic therapies do cure a proportion of women with early-stage breast cancer.”

Full article can be found online at http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/05/12/AR2005051201581.html?referrer=email&referrer=email