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The Milan trial that first showed chemotherapy given after breast cancer surgery reduces relapse: 5 per cent of women given CMF had relapsed after 27 months, against 24 per cent of those who were not.
Prolonged cyclic combination chemotherapy with cyclophosphamide, methotrexate and fluorouracil (CMF) was evaluated as adjuvant treatment after radical mastectomy in women with primary breast cancer and positive axillary nodes, at the Istituto Nazionale Tumori in Milan. After 27 months of study, relapse had occurred in 24 per cent of 179 control patients and in 5.3 per cent of 207 women given CMF (p less than one in a million), with the advantage significant in all subgroups. Women with four or more positive nodes relapsed more often, and 81.5 per cent of first relapses were at distant sites. The authors cautioned that the effect on survival and the long-term side effects were not yet known.
This is where adjuvant chemotherapy for breast cancer begins: the idea that treating the whole body after an apparently complete operation prevents cancers that would otherwise return. Anthracycline and taxane regimens later did better than CMF.
Shares Umberto Veronesi, Fondazione IRCCS Istituto Nazionale dei Tumori, New England Journal of Medicine, Breast cancer (all types).
Shares Umberto Veronesi, Fondazione IRCCS Istituto Nazionale dei Tumori, Breast cancer (all types).
Shares Fondazione IRCCS Istituto Nazionale dei Tumori, Breast cancer (all types).
Shares Umberto Veronesi, Fondazione IRCCS Istituto Nazionale dei Tumori.
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