Neoadjuvant chemotherapy: practice and thinking for Chinese patients with early breast cancer

摘要

Although some researchers hypothesized that neoadjuvant chemotherapy may improve prognosis of patients with breast cancer because it allows them to receive earlier systemic treatment, no large randomized controlled trials have confirmed this hypothesis. Thus, it is generally accepted that there is no difference in disease-free survival (DFS) or overall survival (OS) for patients receiving neoadjuvant or adjuvant chemotherapy for breast cancer.[1,2] Karagiannis et al[3] published an article in 2017 that incited some controversy because it reported that neoadjuvant chemotherapy promoted breast cancer micro-metastasis to the blood vessels and lungs, based on the study of a polyomavirus middle T antigen mouse model and human xenograft in vivo and in fixed tissue.