neoadjuvant or adjuvant chemo?

new_direction

http://summaries.cochrane.org/CD005002/preoperative-chemotherapy-for-women-with-operable-breast-cancer

Chemotherapy for patients with early stage breast cancer has been shown to improve survival. Traditionally, this therapy is given once the patient has undergone surgery. Since the early 1980's, interest has risen in administrating chemotherapy before surgery (known as preoperative or neoadjuvant chemotherapy) based on good results achieved in patients with locally advanced disease (cancer which is larger than 5cm and/or has spread to surrounding tissue or lymph nodes, or both). The rationale for preoperative chemotherapy is that an early introduction of systemic treatment (treatment that affects the whole body) will result in a decrease in the size of the tumour, hence making it possible to do more breast-conserving surgery. For this review, we investigated the effect of the difference in timing of chemotherapy treatment for patients with early stage or operable disease. This review identified 14 randomised controlled trials involving 5,500 women addressing this question. The analyses revealed no difference in overall survival and disease-free survival for women who received either preoperative or postoperative chemotherapy. Preoperative treatment makes more breast-conserving surgery possible because of shrinkage of the tumour before surgical intervention (relative risk, 0.82; 95% confidence interval, 0.76 to 0.89). However, this also results in a increase of loco-regional recurrence (recurrence in the same area) rate (hazard ratio, 1.12; 95% confidence interval, 0.92 to 1.37). Preoperative chemotherapy provides the possibility of monitoring tumour response and making appropriate regimen changes once the tumour appears to be resistant to the primary therapy. Adverse effects, which were reported in only half of the studies, were fewer in women receiving preoperative chemotherapy. Although, postoperative complications, nausea and vomiting, and alopecia were equally distributed, events of cardiotoxicity were less likely (relative risk, 0.74; 95% confidence interval, 0.53 to 1.04) in women receiving preoperative chemotherapy. Also, serious infection (analysed in 2799 women) was less likely to occur in women receiving preoperative chemotherapy (relative risk, 0.69; 95% confidence interval, 0.56 to 0.84).