Nature reviews. Clinical oncology
-
Taxanes are among the most widely used chemotherapy agents for advanced breast cancer. Results are now available from 21 trials that randomly allocated nearly 36,000 women with early-stage breast cancer to receive first-generation taxane-based adjuvant chemotherapy versus non-taxane-based adjuvant regimens. ⋯ We review the results of the first-generation taxane trials and discuss possible explanations for the differences observed in these studies, including variation in the 'strength' of anthracycline therapy in the control arms; suboptimal timing, dosing, or schedule of the taxane regimen; a masking effect of trials that included patients with relatively chemotherapy-insensitive luminal A disease; and decreased representation of the putative taxane-sensitive disease subset. Inclusion criteria for future clinical trials must be revised to account for the molecular heterogeneity of breast cancer and further optimize the role of adjuvant taxane therapy in early-stage disease.
-
If cancer survival is reported to be worsening over time or inferior compared to other countries, politicians and health-care workers may get blamed because suboptimal care is presumed to be the cause. Yet, a variety of reasons exist for cancer survival statistics to change for the worse, of which deterioration of care is only one. ⋯ In addition, deleterious changes in the distribution of prognostic factors and in the distribution of sociodemographic characteristics may negatively affect survival proportions. In this article, we identify the pitfalls that might be encountered in comparisons of published, population-based survival data from different time periods or populations.