Understanding Adjuvant Chemotherapy for Breast Cancer

Randomized clinical trials have shown that chemotherapy, tamoxifen, and ovarian ablation can each reduce the frequency of relapses and prolong survival among patients with operable breast cancer and ipsilateral axillary-lymph-node metastases1. As a result, almost all such patients now receive adjuvant systemic therapy. Multiagent chemotherapy is the present treatment of choice for premenopausal women with node-positive breast cancer2; for postmenopausal women, endocrine therapy, alone or in combination with chemotherapy, is advantageous3,4.During the past 20 years, many schedules of adjuvant chemotherapy with a combination of cyclophosphamide, methotrexate, and fluorouracil have been evaluated in patients with breast . . .