Trends in survival for patients with metastatic breast cancer: is survival improving?

Introduction: The treatment of patients with metastatic breast cancer (mBC) is one of the most difficult problems in clinical oncology. Clinical trial results suggest that novel therapies may be having a favorable impact on the survival of mBC patients, but the real impact of new therapies on OS rates has yet to be established. The aim of this outcome study was to evaluate the most reliable parameters to define the long-term result in terms of OS of different treatment strategies for mBC patients in a real-world clinical practice. Materials and methods: A retrospective analysis of consecutive patients diagnosed with mBC between February 2001 and December 2008 and treated at our medical oncology unit was performed. Results: We evaluated 70 female patients. At the last follow-up all patients had died. Median OS was 31.55 months (range, 2.33-100.13). There was no statistically significant difference in OS (p = 0.284) between the period 2001-2004 and the period 2005-2008. We did not find any statistically significant difference in OS even in the transition from one year to the next (p = 0.154). Conclusions: The results of the current analysis suggest that the OS of women with mBC has not improved in the last years. However, these results should be interpreted with caution, considering the difficulty of determining changes in survival over time. Larger studies are needed to corroborate our findings.