Increase In Chemotherapy Use Appears To Reflect U.S. Treatment Recommendations.(Brief Article)

2001 SEP 13 - (NewsRx.com & NewsRx.net) -- There has been a 30% increase in the use of chemotherapy in women diagnosed with breast carcinoma between 1991-1996, according to a study published in the August 15, 2001, issue of Cancer.

The increased use of chemotherapy, which over time has come to reflect contemporary treatment consensus guidelines more closely, was evident primarily among patients ages 65-69 years and in those patients with advanced stage tumors at the time of diagnosis.

Over the past several decades, chemotherapy has been found to be effective in the treatment of women with breast carcinoma, but its efficacy and the corresponding guidelines for its use vary according to the tumor stage and age of the patient. In a U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) consensus statement, combination chemotherapy was considered to be the standard treatment for breast carcinoma patients age

The current study was conducted by Xianglin Du, MD, PhD, from the Department of Internal Medicine at John Sealy Hospital, University of Texas Medical Branch, in Galveston, and colleagues to assess trends in the use of chemotherapy among women age 65 years who were diagnosed with breast carcinoma between 1991-1996, and how these trends have changed over time to reflect the 1990 NIH consensus treatment recommendations. The researchers obtained information from the national Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results (SEER) cancer registry and a Medicare database regarding women who were diagnosed with breast carcinoma during that time period. The SEER database includes 11 registries in the U.S., representing approximately 14% of the total population.

By matching the SEER cases with the information available in the Medicare database, Du and coworkers were able to identify a study population of 35,060 patients diagnosed with Stage I-IV (American Joint Commission on Cancer staging) breast carcinoma between 1991-1996. The researchers investigated the use of chemotherapy in these patients within a six-month period after diagnosis.

After controlling for variations in tumor size, disease stage, and other factors, the findings of the current study indicated that women who were diagnosed with breast carcinoma in 1996 had a 30% greater chance of receiving chemotherapy than women diagnosed in 1991. The use of chemotherapy in the study population appeared to be strongly influenced by age, with women ages 65-69 years being more than twice ...