New treatment for healing in breast cancer

According to a BBC News report, advanced breast cancer patients treated with palbociclib and hormone therapy survived ten months longer than patients receiving hormone therapy alone. Combination therapy also triggered the onset of chemotherapy with frequent severe side effects.

Experts say the preliminary results of the experiment are very encouraging. However, they have also been warned that this combination therapy is not a cure, and is not always effective.

The control group of the clinical trial received placebo instead of palbociclib to find out if the combination of medicine and hormone therapy works in advanced breast cancer cases. In the experiment, 521 patients with advanced breast cancer of the estrogen receptor were present and had no HER2 gene in their tumors.

Estrogen receptor positive breast cancer is the most common form of breast cancer, accounting for 70 percent of cases.

Research conducted by the London Cancer Research Institute and Royal Marsden NHS Foundation scientists investigated the effect of palbociclib on prolonging patients' lifespan and whether it allowed postponement of chemotherapy.

According to the results of the analysis, women whose tumors had responded well to hormone therapy (410 out of 521 women) had prolonged their survival for ten months, giving them an average of 39.7 months, while those on fulvestrant hormone treatment. placebo, mean survival time was 29.7 months.

However, the combination therapy did not prolong the survival time in patients who had not responded well to hormone therapy.

Three years after the experiment, 49.6 percent of the patients treated with the combination of palbociclib and fulvestrant were alive and 40.8 percent were treated with fulvestrant alone.

Women who received combination therapy had to start chemotherapy nine months later.
Professor Turner, Nicholas Turner, emphasized that in the last two decades, palbociclib has been one of the greatest advances in the treatment of advanced breast cancer patients.

The scientist has pointed out that this targeted treatment is much more friendly to chemotherapy and allows women to continue their normal life as long as possible.

Palbociclib is currently available in the UK for estrogen receptor positive breast cancer women who have been diagnosed after the disease has spread. The authors of the study want to get those whose breast tumors have been treated with hormone therapy before.

(Source: marmalade.co.uk; MTI | Picture: pixabay.com)