Effects of chemotherapy and hormonal therapy for early breast cancer on recurrence and 15-year survival: an overview of the randomised trials

Comparison of epidemiological features, clinicopathological features, and treatments between premenopausal and postmenopausal female breast cancer patients in western China: a retrospective multicenter study of 15,389 female patients

“…The ER and PR status are important indicators to guide endocrine therapy in breast cancer. It is also an important factor affecting the prognosis of breast cancer 33, 34. Wittliff studied the relationship between menopausal status and ER and reported that the positive expression of ER occurred at a rate of 45% in premenopausal women and at a rate of <63% in postmenopausal patients 35.…”

“…Chemotherapy is one of the most commonly used and most effective methods among adjuvant therapies for treating breast cancer. Premenopausal patients had a smaller average age, higher malignancy, and risk of recurrence of the tumors 32, and it was reported that chemotherapy can significantly reduce the risk of relapse of high malignant breast cancer 34, 40, so they could benefit more from chemotherapy. The discovery of more aggressive cancers found in premenopausal women is the fact that leads to more chemotherapy in this population.…”

The 70-gene prognosis-signature predicts disease outcome in breast cancer patients with 1–3 positive lymph nodes in an independent validation study

“…Tumour characteristics in the poor signature group, i.e. more ER-negative and poorly differentiated, are generally believed to be associated with a higher likelihood of response to chemotherapy [4]. Moreover, Albain et al recently presented data on the 21-gene recurrence score (RS) in lymph node-positive patients, showing that nodepositive patients classified as high RS have more benefit from chemotherapy in addition to tamoxifen [13].…”

“…Consequently, patients with axillary lymph node metastases are considered as having a poor prognosis and hence are most likely to benefit from adjuvant chemotherapy, with an absolute benefit of 6-15% at 5 years [4]. However, up to 25-30% of node-positive patients will remain free of distant metastases even without adjuvant systemic therapy [4,5].…”

Antiestrogens: structure-activity relationships and use in breast cancer treatment

“…About 25% of ER+ patients with early-stage disease will develop resistance to endocrine treatment within 10 years of diagnosis (EBCTCG 2005), and all metastatic patients will eventually progress on endocrine treatment. Notably, expression of ERα is preserved in the majority of tumors after development of resistance (Johnston 1997), suggesting a continued role of ERα in tumor progression.…”