Adjuvant chemotherapy: how much is enough?

摘要

Adjuvant chemotherapy has been shown to improve outcomes for patients with early-stage breast cancer.1 Further incremental improvements in outcome for patients with node-positive breast cancer have been made over the past 10 years with the addition of new agents, particularly taxanes, to anthracycline-based chemotherapy backbones, such that the current standard of care is the use of taxanes, concurrently or sequentially, with anthracyclines.1 In The Lancet Oncology today, Joensuu and colleagues2 show that adding capecitabine to this taxane-anthracycline backbone further improves outcome for patients with predominantly node-positive breast cancer. The magnitude of benefit is similar to that seen previously with the addition of taxanesto anthracyclines, and was noted despite a quarter of patients not completing the prescribed duration of capecitabine because of toxicity.