Breast cancer drug combined with chemotherapy ‘cuts recurrence by a third’
Reported December 12, 2008
Researchers found that women who took the pill Xeloda, or capecitabine, on top of their treatment were less likely to die or have the cancer spread to another part of their body.
The drug has already proved useful in women in advanced stages of the disease, but the new study showed that it also was successful in combating the cancer in all sufferers of the disease.
Breast cancer is the most common form of the disease diagnosed in women.
More than 45,000 women develop the disease in Britain every year and around a third of these will go on to die from it.
Tests on 1,500 women in Finland and Sweden show that taking the drug on top of standard chemotherapy treatment cuts the chance of the disease returning by 43 per cent.
The findings were presented at a breast cancer conference in San Antonio, Texas by the Finnish Breast Cancer Group, who led the study.
Other findings presented at the conference included a test to tell which breast cancer patients benefit from a type of chemotherapy, potentially saving thousands from debilitating side effects.
Between 20 and 40 per cent of sufferers do not carry a duplication of a chromosome in their DNA, which indicates that the drugs, called anthracyclines, will not work for them, Cancer Research UK scientists found.
Researchers from CRUK also presented evidence that the success of a breast cancer drug in preventing the disease is linked reductions in breast density.
Patients whose breast density fell more than 10 per cent within 18 months of taking tamoxifen were 63 per cent less likely to develop the disease.
