‘Soft’ chemo could help breast victims live longer

ELDERLY patients with terminal breast cancer could live longer with mild chemotherapy, research suggests.

Traditional chemotherapy drugs can cause such severe side effects that they are often not given to older people in the late stages of cancer.

But now scientists have found ‘soft’ chemotherapy can prolong life without severely affecting its quality. While effective in younger patients with the aggressive HER-2 positive form of breast cancer, the chemotherapy drug docetaxel is often toxic in older women. Researchers, led by the University Hospital Leuven in Belgium, wanted to test whether a milder drug combined with existing immunotherapy treatments could be effective at halting the cancer’s spread.

In a study of 80 patients aged 70 and over, they gave the drug metronomic oral cyclophosphamide and the established immunotherapy treatments Herceptin and Perjeta to some, while others got only the standard medicines.

Those given the combination, rather than just Herceptin and Perjeta, more than doubled the length of time without the disease getting worse from six to 13 months.

Hans Wildiers, who led the study, published in The Lancet Oncology, said: ‘These results were encouraging since we found with gentle therapy, we could delay tumour growth in a significant proportion of frail patients for long periods.

‘In this age group… quality of life and the avoidance of toxic side-effects may be just as important as survival.’

The researchers want to conduct wider studies but say funding may be hard to get because drug companies are reluctant to support trials involving the elderly.

Dr Denis Lacombe, of the European Organisation for Research and Treatment of Cancer, said: ‘These results underline how important it is to investigate drug efficacy… in older patients.’