ABSTRACT
BACKGROUND/AIM: In this retrospective study, we compared breast cancer patients treated with and without mistletoe lectin I (ML-I) in addition to standard breast cancer treatment in order to determine a possible effect of this complementary treatment. PATIENTS AND METHODS: This study included 18,528 patients with invasive breast cancer. Data on additional ML-I treatments were reported for 164 patients. We developed a "similar case" method with a distance measure retrieved from the beta variable in Cox regression to compare these patients, after stage adjustment, with their non-ML-1 treated counterparts in order to answer three hypotheses concerning overall survival, recurrence free survival and life quality. RESULTS: Raw data analysis of an additional ML-I treatment yielded a worse outcome (p=0.02) for patients with ML treatment, possibly due to a bias inherent in the ML-I-treated patients. Using the "similar case" method (a case-based reasoning approach) we could not confirm this harm for patients using ML-I. Analysis of life quality data did not demonstrate reliable differences between patients treated with ML-I treatment and those without proven ML-I treatment. CONCLUSION: Based on a "similar case" model we did not observe any differences in the overall survival (OS), recurrence-free survival (RFS), and quality of life data between breast cancer patients with standard treatment and those who in addition to standard treatment received ML-I treatment.
Subject(s)
Breast Neoplasms/drug therapy , Ribosome Inactivating Proteins, Type 2/therapeutic use , Toxins, Biological/therapeutic use , Aged , Breast Neoplasms/pathology , Disease-Free Survival , Humans , Middle Aged , Neoplasm Invasiveness , Quality of Life , Retrospective Studies , Treatment OutcomeABSTRACT
BACKGROUND: The well-characterized tubular-type of breast tumors is classified as low-risk breast cancer. PATIENTS AND METHODS: We report on the results of a retrospective analysis on clinical and biological features of 248 tubular breast tumors including follow-up and treatment data from two German series of 21,065 breast cancer cases. The majority of tumors were stage I or stage II, ER- and PR-positive and c-erbB2-negative with a 5-year survival-rate of 96.3%. 51.3% of patients received hormonal treatment, 75.5% had post-operative radiotherapy and 11.8% were treated with a chemotherapeutical regimen. CONCLUSION: Our retrospective analysis showed no treatment benefit for either anti-hormonal or chemotherapeutical regimens. Post-operative radiotherapy, however, improved the survival rate of patients with tubular carcinoma (log-rank=5, p=0.025). Our data suggest that post-operative radiotherapy is an important treatment to prolong survival for patients suffering from tubular breast cancer.
