New Treating HER2-Positive Breast Cancer

New Treating HER2-Positive Breast Cancer.
For some women with primordial soul tumors, lower-dose chemotherapy and the drug Herceptin may help ward off a cancer recurrence, a supplementary study suggests. Experts said the findings, published in the Jan 8, 2015 New England Journal of Medicine, could put up the first standard treatment approach for women in the untimely stages of HER2-positive breast cancer. HER2 is a protein that helps breast cancer cells thicken and spread, and about 15 to 20 percent of breast cancers are HER2-positive, according to the US National Cancer Institute.

Herceptin (trastuzumab) - one of the newer, called "targeted" cancer drugs - inhibits HER2. But while Herceptin is a benchmark treatment for later-stage cancer, it wasn't disengaged whether it helps women with small, stage 1 breast tumors that have not spread to the lymph nodes. Women with those cancers have a extent low risk of recurrence after surgery and radiation - but it's exhilarated enough that doctors often offer chemotherapy and Herceptin as an "adjuvant," or additional, therapy, explained Dr Sara Tolaney, of the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston.

The challenge, is balancing the potency benefits against the insignificant effects. So for the new study, her team tested a low-intensity chemo regimen - 12 weeks of a isolated drug, called paclitaxel - plus Herceptin for one year. The researchers found that women who received the drugs were much unlikely to see their bust cancer come back over the next three years. Of the 406 study patients, less than 2 percent had a recurrence.