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Adjuvant Systemic Therapy |
Adjuvant trastuzumab for smaller,
node-negative, HER2-positive tumors
(Figure 1)
DR HAROLD J BURSTEIN: This
question for the patient with a node-negative,
HER2-positive tumor comes
up often in the clinical setting because
the value of trastuzumab for higher-risk,
node-positive breast cancer is clearly
established.
The tumor board question we most
frequently encounter for HER2-positive
disease relates to these particularly small
tumors, with which patients generally
have a good prognosis.
As a general strategy, trastuzumab
appears to reduce the risk of recurrence
by one half. Across all of the adjuvant trials,
that 50 percent risk reduction stands
out as a consistent finding. The questions
are, what is the residual risk for
these smaller, HER2-positive tumors,
and would it make sense to offer a treatment
that would cut that risk in half?
Most of us seriously consider offering
trastuzumab-based therapy to women
with tumors greater than six millimeters
in size, which is admittedly an arbitrary
cutoff. It resonates because, historically,
that was about the absolute smallest
tumor size for which we would consider
adjuvant chemotherapy in the era before
trastuzumab.
I would treat this patient with chemotherapy
and trastuzumab. A regimen
such as docetaxel/carboplatin/ trastuzumab (TCH) would be reasonable,
but I would more commonly use four
cycles of AC followed by trastuzumab
or AC TH. We recently activated a
clinical trial in which we are using 12
weeks of paclitaxel with trastuzumab
followed by the remainder of a year of
trastuzumab to see if we can use a single
chemotherapy drug for a three-month
duration and avoid an anthracycline for
these patients with lower-risk disease as
defined by tumor size.
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Click on the image to enlarge

Estimated risk of relapse for smaller,
HER2-positive tumors (Figure 2)
DR BURSTEIN: It’s hard to find meaningful
data on the clinical outcomes
for tumors that are smaller than one
centimeter, particularly for stratification
by HER2 status. Our own group
from Massachusetts General and Dana-Farber reported an abstract about a year
ago at San Antonio, which reported on
our patients with T1N0 breast cancer,
who were historically treated with a variety
of adjuvant therapies. We identified
a risk of recurrence of about 15 to 20
percent over 10 years, which is not too
far from what people were estimating in
the survey.
The NSABP has conducted several trials over the years that have included
women with small tumors. In a publication
a couple of years ago in the Journal of
the National Cancer Institute, the NSABP
showed that for women with 1-cm or
smaller tumors, the risk of recurrence
over about eight years of follow-up was
approximately 10 to 15 percent. They
did not have that broken out by HER2
status, but that would be the estimate
for the subset of patients with ER-negative
disease. I probably would have said
about 15 percent, but I believe that’s still
a higher risk than we would have imagined
for a tumor that was both ER-positive
and HER2-negative.
Estimating the risk of cardiac toxicity
associated with trastuzumab
in
combination with chemotherapy (Figure 2)
DR BURSTEIN: Cardiac toxicity is a
major concern with trastuzumab-based regimens. Of the 10,000 women treated
in the adjuvant trastuzumab trials, 9,000
received anthracycline-based regimens.
In the best cardiac analyses conducted,
which included independent cardiac
review, comprehensive case tracking and
assessment with follow-up including resolution
of cardiac symptoms, the NSABP
suggests about a four percent risk of clinically
apparent congestive heart failure
with an anthracycline and trastuzumab-based
regimen.
They seem to have identified some
risk factors, which include preexisting
hypertension, borderline cardiac ejection
fraction at baseline and age greater than
60 or 65 years. The four percent estimate
is probably the best number in the aggregate,
but it probably is determined in
part by some clinical features that most
clinicians can easily tease out.
The TCH regimen, yet to be published,
has not shown as high a rate of
congestive heart failure in preliminary
reports. The two percent estimate from
the clinical investigators in the survey
seems about right.
It might be a little higher than the
one percent estimate that Dennis
Slamon has reported. On the other
hand, the case assessment has been
somewhat less rigorous in this trial
to date than has been reported in
the North American Intergroup and
NSABP experiences.
Adjuvant therapy selection
for a
65-year-old patient with a 1.5-cm,
node-negative, HER2-positive tumor
(Figures 3-4)
DR BURSTEIN: For patients whose risk
of relapse is greater, I feel somewhat
more strongly about the concurrent as
opposed to the sequential use of chemotherapy
and trastuzumab.
We don’t have definitive data yet, but
the comparisons from N9831 (AC T
versus AC T followed sequentially by
trastuzumab versus AC T with concurrent
trastuzumab) suggest that using
chemotherapy and trastuzumab concurrently
may be particularly useful. So for
patients whose risk is higher, I strongly
prefer concurrent chemotherapy and trastuzumab regimens, which include
AC TH or TCH.
We still principally use anthracycline-based
regimens. Anthracyclines are historically
important drugs in breast cancer.
Comprehensive retrospective analyses
suggest that the one group of patients
in whom these drugs work is those with
HER2-driven breast cancer. I believe
they probably still have a role even with
trastuzumab.
All of us are eager to see how the more
mature data from BCIRG 006 develop.
That study, which used docetaxel for
the T, was never designed to compare
the TCH to AC TH. Numerically,
they appear similar. The differences in
clinical events are few, though obviously
those data are still maturing.

Adjuvant therapy selection for a
42-year-old patient with a 1.2-cm,
node-positive, HER2-tumor (Figure 5)
DR BURSTEIN: The risk of recurrence
has gone up because the tumor is node-positive.
With that, the recommendations
for an anthracycline-based regimen
have risen. I don’t disagree with
that because, as I mentioned, that’s our
preferred regimen.
I don’t know of data to tell you
whether to use an anthracycline-based
regimen or TCH based on those
clinical features. None of the studies
have reported that anthracyclines are
particularly valuable in younger versus
older women. I suspect physicians may
be making this recommendation based
on cardiotoxicity risk.
Clearly, younger women seem to
bear a lower risk of cardiotoxicity with
the anthracyclines. We have not seen
a detailed breakout of the cardiac risk
associated with TCH as a function
of age, though the events may be rare
enough that it’s hard to do.
Trastuzumab may be the trump card.
Therefore, whatever you use besides
trastuzumab may not be relevant. This
is why we feel that going ahead with a
paclitaxel/trastuzumab trial for patients
with low-risk disease makes sense.

Adjuvant therapy selection for elderly
patients with HER2-positive disease
(Figure 6)
DR BURSTEIN: HER2-driven disease
is far more frequent in younger than in
older women. You shouldn’t be seeing
too much HER2-positive breast cancer
among women in their seventies and eighties. In large registry-type studies,
we would expect fewer than five or eight
percent of those tumors to be HER2-positive.
I expect relatively few people in your
survey had used TCH for an 80-year-old
woman, to know what that experience is
like. I’ve used it for some septuagenarians,
and it’s a tough regimen. It’s not
a trivial chemotherapy regimen to get
people through.
I believe for older women, it becomes
ever more the “art of medicine” to assess
their comorbid conditions, their existing
cardiac function and the importance
of these treatments. If they’re healthy
enough to tolerate the treatment and
healthy enough that they merit consideration
of treatment, then I believe any of
these regimens would still be reasonable.
These regimens work in older women
to the extent that they’re at risk for
breast cancer recurrence. Hyman Muss
and others have shown, through retrospective
work, that chemotherapy works
as well in older patients as in younger
patients if they have chemotherapy-sensitive
tumors. So practitioners need more
clinical seasoning to feel strongly that
one regimen is preferable to another.
I would most likely recommend four
cycles of AC followed by trastuzumab
for a 70-year-old patient with a 1.2-cm,
node-negative, ER-negative, PR-negative,
HER2-positive tumor. If you wanted to
try TCH, that would be reasonable, but
it’s not a trivial regimen. Trastuzumab
monotherapy would not be my choice if the tumor were ER-negative. No data
support the role of adjuvant trastuzumab
for patients not treated with chemotherapy.
Click on the image to enlarge

ALTTO trial design (Figure 8)
DR BURSTEIN: ALTTO is a randomized
trial in which patients receive chemotherapy
with either trastuzumab alone,
trastuzumab and lapatinib, lapatinib
alone, or a sequence of lapatinib followed
by trastuzumab.
One wrinkle to this study is that
clinicians have the option of administering
chemotherapy first, followed by the
biologic therapy, or chemotherapy concurrently
with the biologic therapy. It’s
a somewhat complicated study. For that
reason, it’s a large trial — an 8,000-person
trial. A simpler study might have compared
chemotherapy with trastuzumab
to chemotherapy with trastuzumab and
lapatinib. Preclinical data suggest that
trastuzumab and lapatinib is better than
either drug alone.
On the other hand, that trial would
not have answered the lapatinib monotherapy
question, which certainly is of
interest because it might be appealing as
an orally available drug, if it’s shown to
be as effective and tolerable as intravenous
trastuzumab.
I agree with the sentiments expressed
by some people that for a patient with a
substantial risk of recurrence, the possibility
of using lapatinib monotherapy
in the adjuvant setting is of concern
when we know that trastuzumab is a
life-saving drug. This is evident in the
survey results. I believe in the US, a bias
will emerge toward enrolling patients
with lower-risk disease in ALTTO.
Whether the Europeans or the rest of
the global community will feel the same
way remains to be seen.

Clinical use of adjuvant aromatase
inhibitors as initial therapy (Figure 9)
DR BURSTEIN: Three aromatase inhibitors
are commercially available. If clinical
differences between them exist, it’s been
impossible to tease them out to date. I believe that any one of these is probably
a reasonable clinical choice.
Having said that, we have data for
the use of both anastrozole and letrozole
as initial adjuvant treatment, and we do
not have those data to date from trials
involving exemestane, although such
studies have been concluded and eventually
we will have the data.
So it wouldn’t be my style preference,
but I don’t believe it’s a big mistake to use
exemestane. It probably wouldn’t be my
first choice, but if a patient comes to me
six weeks into treatment and says, “I feel great on this drug,” I wouldn’t derail that
plan, if she were tolerating it.

Duration of therapy with an adjuvant
aromatase inhibitor (Figure 10)
DR BURSTEIN: Before we had data from
the NSABP-B-14 extension trial and the
Scottish trial, patients were often receiving
more than five years of tamoxifen.
It turned out, at least based on the
literature we have so far, that this was
not clinically valuable. We need answers
to the question, does extending adjuvant
therapy beyond five years of an
aromatase inhibitor improve long-term
clinical outcomes?
Ongoing studies by the NCIC and
the NSABP are randomly assigning
women who have finished five years of an
aromatase inhibitor to ongoing therapy
with an aromatase inhibitor or placebo.
We will have data, but there are none
right now. What we can say is that we
have a large safety experience for five
years of treatment.
Parenthetically, I believe that one of
the cleanest of the adjuvant aromatase
inhibitor trials to interpret is MA17,
which evaluated five years of tamoxifen
followed by placebo or an aromatase
inhibitor. Clearly, switching to an
aromatase inhibitor was helpful. That
study also reawakened us to the importance
of the second and the third five
years after diagnosis.
If you conceptualize hormone receptor-positive breast cancer as a disease
with a 10-to 15-year latency period,
then it is possible that ongoing durations
of antiestrogen therapy with aromatase
inhibitors might be helpful, but we don’t
actually have those data.
In contrast, we do have data suggesting
that a successful strategy could
be five years of tamoxifen and then five
years of an aromatase inhibitor.
For women who have finished five
years of tamoxifen and then five years
of an aromatase inhibitor, we certainly
don’t have data showing that therapy for
longer than 10 years is valuable, and we
usually conclude therapy at that point.
Women who have received tamoxifen for a couple of years and then an aromatase
inhibitor for five years are then out to
year seven or eight.
I don’t have a big problem extending
their therapy to year 10, but again, we
only have safety data for five years of an
aromatase inhibitor. For a woman who
starts an aromatase inhibitor at year
zero, we have no data suggesting that
ongoing therapy would be helpful. We
all thought that tamoxifen indefinitely
would be helpful, which has turned out
to not be the case so far.
You can observe several different
kinds of patients. You have the women
who, three years ago, circled the date on
their calendar on which they would finish
their adjuvant endocrine therapy, and
they’ve been counting down. For such
women, I believe it’s certainly reasonable to stop treatment at that time. Then you
have women who feel fine or may not
feel perfect but love the idea of taking
something because it feels reassuring
to undergo some treatment to prevent
breast cancer recurrence.
For those women, I don’t have a major
objection to extending the duration of
treatment with the aromatase inhibitors,
but we don’t know how valuable that
would be.

Arthralgias related to the aromatase
inhibitors (Figure 11)
DR BURSTEIN: Increasingly we are
finding that patients have musculoskeletal
symptoms related to the use of
aromatase inhibitors. This is a fairly old
observation. It was first reported in the
literature, in patients with metastatic
disease, seven or eight years ago, when
the aromatase inhibitors became widely
used in that setting. Now it’s increasingly
prevalent in the early-stage setting.
An interesting study of 200 consecutively
screened women who were receiving
an aromatase inhibitor in the early-stage
setting was conducted at Columbia
in New York.
The important methodological point
from this paper was that investigators
didn’t ask the doctors whether patients
were experiencing arthralgias — they
asked the patients. And over 80 percent
of patients said, “Yes, I’m experiencing
arthralgias.”
Musculoskeletal symptoms are
enormously prevalent in our society.
Interestingly, for two thirds of the patients
the onset of these symptoms seemed
directly related to the use of the aromatase
inhibitor. In fact, half of the patients had
begun on their own to take something,
an over-the-counter anti-inflammatory
medicine, acetaminophen or something
else, to minimize the arthralgias. This
says to me that these are clinically real
phenomena. I believe that the doctors’
one-in-three estimate is something that
they’re making up because that’s what
we hear about.
Without a strong comparator group,
it’s hard to know how much of the
arthralgias are from any antiestrogen intervention or from some concurrent
baseline, nonspecific arthritic-type condition,
which is common.
Studies define these difficulties in
different ways, so it’s hard to assess the
toxicity experience in the major trials,
in which severe toxicity was reported by
way of case report forms, and relate that
to the experience of patients.
What do you do about the arthralgias?
We all talk about acetaminophen
and nonsteroidals. Anecdotally, it’s not
clear that those help much. What does
seem to help has been some moderate
level of regular exercise. Patients who
can get some exercise often find that this
alleviates some of their discomfort.
In early 2008, we will begin a placebo-controlled intervention study on
alleviating these symptoms. Our strategy
is similar to the successful method that
Chuck Loprinzi has used at the Mayo
Clinic to study hot flashes. We’re hoping
to use some novel agents to pharmacologically
treat these symptoms. Using a
placebo-controlled trial design, we will
identify which ones might work.

Arthralgias related to chemotherapy
(Figure 12)
DR BURSTEIN: A classic paper from
the Mayo Clinic in the Journal of Clinical
Oncology in the late 1980s or early
1990s reported what they called chemotherapy-induced arthritis. It was a series
of eight or 10 women, all of whom were
in their late forties, who received chemotherapy
and presumably experienced
chemotherapy-induced amenorrhea and
menopause. Then they began to develop
these significant arthritis symptoms.
In the recent JCO paper (Crew
2007), investigators found that taxane-based
adjuvant chemotherapy seemed
to increase the risk of musculoskeletal
complications. I’m not sure that’s my
experience in the clinic. The answers
from your survey were all over the map
on that one. So I believe more data are
needed to verify that.
Certainly, paclitaxel is associated
with a myalgia syndrome, which typically
arises four to five days after treatment.
Patients who are receiving growth
factor support often have some bone
marrow swelling and develop diffuse
musculoskeletal achiness about a week
into treatment. These are a fairly common
set of symptoms among patients
with breast cancer.

Chemotherapy-induced amenorrhea
(Figure 13)
DR BURSTEIN: The standard treatment
for a young woman who has breast
cancer is tamoxifen. Good case-report
experience indicates that many of these
women in their early forties or younger
will actually recover ovarian function in
the months and even years after chemotherapy.
In those cases, monitoring FSH
and LH at a single time doesn’t tell you
what will happen with the ovarian function
in the future.
Both our group and Ian Smith’s
group in London have published cases
of women just like this who had begun
menopause with chemotherapy. They
were started on an aromatase inhibitor.
In many of these cases, their FSH levels
were actually in the postmenopausal
range. Their ovarian function recovered
and they were not receiving effective
endocrine therapy. I feel strongly that the
correct answer here is tamoxifen until
menopause is demonstrated unequivocally. Single or even serial measurements
of FSH and LH don’t tell you what will
happen with these women in the future.
So I discourage the monitoring of these
levels and clinical decision-making based
on those measures.


Click on the image to enlarge

Hormonal therapy for premenopausal
women (Figure 16)
DR BURSTEIN: Since the patient is
premenopausal, I believe the answers in
the survey reflect the desire to treat her
with tamoxifen initially, which I would
agree with because it works irrespective
of menopausal status.
I believe many favor the idea of switching
treatment once it’s clear she’s menopausal.
So in two to three or five years
after chemotherapy, with the expectation
she would be menopausal, they would
switch her to an aromatase inhibitor.
We don’t know what her menopausal
status would be after four cycles of AC
or TC. In clinical practice, this is a situation
in which you would have to find out what happens as time goes by. I feel
pretty strongly that an aromatase inhibitor
with an LHRH agonist is not a preferable
option.
The TEXT study is observing young
premenopausal women who are receiving
ovarian suppression and tamoxifen
or ovarian suppression and an aromatase
inhibitor.
We will have data in the future about
whether the aromatase inhibitors are as
active as tamoxifen in younger women if
used with ovarian suppression.
The worry is that a small fraction of
women may not reach complete ovarian
suppression with an LHRH agonist.
If you’ve treated many women, you
know that in a small proportion of them,
their ovaries won’t functionally shut
down. So you run the risk, if you treat
them with an aromatase inhibitor and an LHRH agonist, of their receiving
no effective endocrine therapy. I would
start with tamoxifen if they were still
premenopausal and I wanted to consider
ovarian suppression.
Only when they were truly postmenopausal
would I consider switching them
to an aromatase inhibitor.
Click on the image to enlarge

Selecting therapy for a patient with a
high Oncotype DX recurrence score
(Figure 16)
DR BURSTEIN: The point of ordering
the Oncotype DX assay for a patient like
this is to find out whether she has either
a low or a high score. A low score would
suggest she doesn’t need chemotherapy.
A high score would suggest she does
need chemotherapy. An intermediate
score would narrow the range of the
potential benefits of chemotherapy but still leave you in an indeterminate posture. I certainly would
have recommended adjuvant chemotherapy for this patient
based on that score. None of the most commonly used regimens
specified here have been explored in combination with
the Oncotype DX assay in the reports from NSABP-B-20. That
study was built around CMF and MF.


I believe most of us would use our typical adjuvant regimen
for patients with node-negative disease. Ours happens to be AC,
typically every two weeks. If people want to use TC, I believe
that’s a reasonable regimen, but it’s not one we routinely use.
DR LEE S SCHWARTZBERG: The Oncotype DX test allows you
to select those patients who are exquisitely sensitive to chemotherapy
and, by the way, probably don’t need aggressive chemotherapy If you examine the data from the NSABP studies, you
see that the chemotherapy administered was a combination of
CMF and MF.
Today no one uses MF, and I believe everyone would agree
that it’s minimal chemotherapy, but despite that, the patients
who were in the high recurrence score group, when they received
CMF or MF, had a conversion of their disease-free survival rate
up into the 90 percent range and a 75 percent relative reduction
in the risk of relapse.
Those patients are exquisitely sensitive, and I’m comfortable
using CMF for many of them. I still use every three-week CMF
because the few times I’ve tried the oral CMF regimen, I found
it difficult for the patients.

Click on the image to enlarge

Selection of chemotherapy in
the adjuvant setting (Figures 21-22)
DR SCHWARTZBERG: We’re in a bit of a bind as practitioners
right now, based on the retrospective analysis recently published
by Dan Hayes in The New England Journal of Medicine. The
data suggested, or at least the media picked up that they
suggested, that taxanes administered after adjuvant AC confer
no benefit for patients with estrogen receptor-positive breast
cancer. The fact that it was published in The New England Journal and, for some reason, received a lot of
uptake from the lay media, I believe, was
the most important aspect of that trial.
At the same time, we have other
esteemed investigators, like Dennis
Slamon, saying that we shouldn’t use
anthracyclines at all. So which regimen
do you use in that common patient population
of women with hormone receptor-positive
early breast cancer?
The data from Hayes had been presented
a year before and were not a surprise
to me whatsoever. The surprise to
me is that a much more abundant data
source of at least seven or eight randomized
trials that have analyzed retrospectively
or, in some cases, prospectively,
suggests that the benefit of anthracyclines
accrues only to patients with HER2-positive disease and, therefore, the benefit
of both anthracyclines and taxanes may occur only in that group of patients.
Further data have been published,
including the retrospective review of
multiple CALGB trials in the Journal of
the American Medical Association, that
show that the incremental benefit of chemotherapy
accrues to patients with ER-negative
tumors, and not so much or not
at all to those with ER-positive disease.

Breast Cancer Update 2007 (1)
DR STEPHEN E JONES: The objective of
our US Oncology trial was to compare
the disease-free survival between AC and TC for women with operable breast
cancer. About half of the women had
node-negative disease, and half had node-positive
disease. We recruited approximately
1,000 patients and had 5.5 years
of median follow-up.
We conducted a preliminary analysis
at about three years, in which a difference
in favor of TC was emerging. At five
years, however, this had become a significant
difference, with a p-value of 0.015.
We saw a one third reduction in the
risk of a breast cancer event among the
patients who received TC, which is a significant
impact and translates into a six
percent absolute difference at five years.
We conducted an exploratory analysis
because of the interest in the differences
in response to adjuvant chemotherapy
between patients with hormone receptor-positive and receptor-negative disease.
About 75 percent of the women
had hormone receptor-positive disease.
No obvious difference appeared between
receptor-positive and receptor-negative
disease with respect to benefit from TC.
A trend toward an overall survival benefit
(p = 0.131) and nearly a 25 percent
lower chance of dying were evident among
the patients treated with TC. If you present
it that way to patients, most will opt
for TC. I believe if this trial were larger or
we had longer follow-up, we might see a
survival difference. The conclusion from
the trial was that TC is a new standard
nonanthracycline adjuvant regimen.
Personally, I would use TC in the
population of patients we studied in this
trial: Those with node-negative disease
or those with one to three positive nodes.
It provides a good reduction in the risk of
recurrence.
We don’t have many data for women
with four or more positive nodes, so I
probably wouldn’t pick TC in those situations,
but I would for the patients with
lower-risk disease or those with cardiac
compromise.
With longer follow-up, TC was associated
with improved DFS and OS compared
to standard AC. TC should now be
a standard nonanthracycline combination
for early BC. In addition, TC was well
tolerated in older women without excessive toxicity compared to their younger
counterparts, and may be preferable due
to its lack of cardiotoxicity.

Click on the image to enlarge

Breast Cancer Update 2007 (2)
DR FRANKIE ANN HOLMES: The US
Oncology trial was a straightforward,
simple idea embraced by the community,
many of whom have concerns about
the anthracyclines. We have now seen
not only a better outcome in the total
population with TC but also benefits
in every subset, although these were not
preplanned analyses.
It is one study, and it was a small study
by modern adjuvant standards. However,
it’s not inconsistent with the data in the
literature, which suggest that docetaxel
is superior to the anthracyclines in
head-to-head studies conducted in the metastatic
setting. I don’t have any problems
with this study because it is reasonably
sized, and the dose intensity was maintained.
I’ve started to incorporate the TC
regimen much more frequently in my
practice, especially in situations in which
I have concerns about chemotherapy
tolerance. However, at this time, I have
not given up on the standard AC/taxane
regimen for my patients with node-positive
disease.
AC is now recognized as a highly
emetogenic regimen, and patients experience
delayed nausea and vomiting. I
was once on a panel that was discussing
emesis, and somebody said, “Oh, that’s
just AC.” Well, AC is associated with a
lot of delayed nausea and vomiting. You
find a lot of hidden toxicity if you step
into the shoes of a patient. It can be incapacitating.
With TC, you don’t have that
burden of emesis and nausea.
Breast Cancer Update Think Tank 2007 (1)
DR ERIC P WINER: I haven’t had trouble
administering TC, and I agree that it
may be less toxic than AC. However,
I am concerned that the well-executed
Intergroup trial, ECOG-E2197, which
compared doxorubicin/docetaxel (AT)
to AC, showed no benefit to AT versus
AC, and yet the Jones data suggest that
docetaxel is better.
If anything, I would have expected
that substituting docetaxel for
cyclophosphamide would provide a bigger
hit. I find it troublesome. I don’t have
an explanation, and it’s why, based on this
one study, I would conclude that TC is
about the same as AC. I’m not ready to
say that TC is better based on one study
of 1,000 patients, considering the fact
that the ECOG-E2197 study has a result
that causes concern.

Breast Cancer Update Think Tank 2007 (2)
DR BURSTEIN: Perhaps in contrast to
what I’m hearing about TC, AC is still
my standard adjuvant therapy for patients
with lower-risk disease. I typically administer
it on a dose-dense, every two-week
schedule. It is a shorter regimen, and I
find it remarkably well tolerated.
I’ve seen more subjective toxicity with
TC, with regard to fatigue and other
problems. In addition, AC is still the
mainstay of the ongoing Intergroup trial
for patients with lower-risk breast cancer
who have zero to three positive nodes.
The dose-dense AC regimen has not
been compared to TC. According to the
US Oncology data, AC and TC are fairly
comparable, perhaps with a small advantage
for TC, but how the dose-dense
schedule impacts that, we don’t know.

Trial of adjuvant dose-dense
AC nab paclitaxel
DR BURSTEIN: We conducted a 56-person feasibility study with dose-dense AC nab paclitaxel in which we substituted nab paclitaxel at 260 mg/m2 for
paclitaxel at 175 mg/m2 on the every
two-week, so-called dose-dense schedule.
We found it necessary to use white
blood cell growth factor support with nab paclitaxel.
One determination we were trying
to make was whether we could get away
without using drugs like pegfilgrastim or
filgrastim when we used nab paclitaxel
instead of paclitaxel. The answer was
no. If you want to keep to the every
two-week schedule, you have to use the
growth factor support. We used pegfilgrastim
mostly.
Otherwise the regimen appeared
comparable to our historical experience
with dose-dense AC T in terms of the
rate of febrile neutropenia, delivery on
schedule and other major toxicity complications.
So I believe it’s a regimen one
could substitute.
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