Have you heard of Chris Wark?

juneping

I was googling about how effective of chemo and found this blog...he's all about alternatives.

i found his blog interesting and apparently he also has a FB page and from there, i read that he's a speaker at a cancer conference. so may be he's big in the young crowd? 

this is the link about how effective chemo...and for breast cancer, it's only 1.4%, sounds very low. pls share what you think of the research he's referring to.

http://www.chrisbeatcancer.com/how-effective-is-ch...

this is the link to the research: it's in the article as well but i copy paste anyway.

http://chrisbeatcancer.com/wp-content/uploads/2011...

Momine

June, I found his blog too early in my cancer treatment. Chris had a cancer in which surgery is the main cure. It is good that he eats his veggies and everything, but most likely the surgery cured him, not the veggies.

There is a lot of downright false info about cancer stats and chemo going around the internet. It can be maddening to figure out what is real and what is not. Typically though, false info will be repeated almost verbatim on several different sites, and usually it will not have a proper source citation. 

You also sometimes get info that is based on one, single, poorly designed or executed study. 

pipers_dream

June, the figure I got from the Susan P. Komen website is 3.5%.  Still not impressed, but that depends on a lot of factors, like age at dx and type of cancer and how many different kinds of rogue cells you have in there.  It wasn't enough to convince me to do it though.  I do like Chris's website and he's the one who got me rebounding, which is a very fun and convenient way to exercise, not to mention one of the best for those with cancer.  

Momine

Pipers, where on the Komen site did you find that figure? Is that the benefit on average or something? I ask because if I put my stats through any of the online "death calculators" (ok, my sense of humor is a little twisted), the benefit in a stage 3 cancer is far higher. I seem to remember something around 15% in my case, meaning that over 10 or 15 years 15 more women out of 100 will be alive because of chemo.

juneping

thanks momine, piper!!

anyway, the number is just very low, i would have thought its in the neighborhood of 60% based on how hard the two MO were pushing me for the chemo. this whole thing is beyond me....

BrooksideVT

JunePing, I quickly scanned the study.  In "Methods" they indicate that they did not consider other factors, among which, they listed hormones, which, for those of us who are ER+, are pretty darned central to our futures.  My oncotype, for instance, showed that tamoxofen for five years would reduce my chance of recurrence by 50% (from about 15% to 7%-ish).  As I am postmenopausal, I am using arimidex instead, which is expected to be even more effective.  With a 7% chance of recurrence (probably even less with arimidex), adding chemo would offer a 2 1/2% benefit, so it was easy to rule that out, and impossible to do anything but grab for the arimidex.  Without the arimidex, chemo would probably have provided a pretty large benefit.

Really, the best test of any new thing that comes along is to run it by the scientifically proven statistics that your onc can show you.  I'm not saying we need to close our eyes and follow blindly, just that there is a huge, huge body of information out there, containing oodles of conflicting information of varying validity and specific applicability.  As Momine indicated, lots of this tends to be repeated and repeated, but without those little footnotes that indicate that someone, somewhere, has conducted a study that is scientifically valid for humans with our particular diagnoses.  Our oncs are in a good place to filter all this "stuff" with our individual cases, and help us sort out the wheat from the chaff.  A decade-old overview of the use of chemo in multiple different cancers, without consideration of contributing factors is vaguely interesting, but not likely to be applicable to individual cases.  If your onc indicated that, in your particular case, chemo would have somewhere in the area of a 60% benefit, then I'd ask him for the studies that so indicate, and I'd expect that he would be able to do so.

juneping

brook - oh no, my MO didn't tell me chemo was 60% effective for me. it's just what i thought when they pushed me that hard. when i refused chemo, my current MO thought i was insane. and my integrative doc also thought i was insane until he saw my oncotype report. he didn't care my score but the chart where i stood. chemo would help me less than 4% (couldn't tell how exactly bc the chart in PDF was so blurry...it actually looked like 2% to me). so he then told me it's "reasonable" for me to refuse chemo. sigh.....

pipers_dream

Momine, here is the link--I think. Susan G. Komen Chemo and Overall Survival It seems to be the same one I saw but not sure b/c it doesn't say 3.5% on there, but I may have split the diff b/c on one table it said 4% and the other one that I also fit into said 3%. Or they've updated it since I saw it last.  I'm in the 50-59 age group.  Interestingly, if you're over 50, chemo makes no difference to your survival whether you're lymph node neg or pos.  

Momine

Piper, thanks so much. Thing is, you really can't say, based on that table, that chemo only gives a 3.5% benefit, since it has various percentages depending on age and node status. Also, the study is from 2005, meaning the women who were studied were treated prior to 2005, which is a fairly long time ago in cancerland. 

Apart from that, it is pretty general and the numbers are averages. It does state at the top that those with the worst prognosis would get the greater benefit (i.e. greater than the average in the chart).

However, even according to that chart, my benefit would be 9% (under 50 at DX, node-positive).

Finally, I really question the conclusion that in the over-50 crowd chemo makes no difference. This contradicts both my own observation and a recent study my doc did on treatment outcomes in "elderly" women.

I looked up the abstract of the actual study, rather than just going by the summary table of the averages. I am guessing that the table on the Komen site is the average benefit of all the chemo regimens studied. But I have a feeling those averages are misleading. Among other things, the abstract says the following:

"Allocation to about 6 months of anthracycline-based polychemotherapy (eg, with FAC or FEC) reduces the annual breast cancer death rate by about 38% (SE 5) for women younger than 50 years of age when diagnosed and by about 20% (SE 4) for those of age 50-69 years when diagnosed, largely irrespective of the use of tamoxifen and of oestrogen receptor (ER) status, nodal status, or other tumour characteristics. Such regimens are significantly (2p=0.0001 for recurrence, 2p<0.00001 for breast cancer mortality) more effective than CMF chemotherapy.

[...]

For middle-aged women with ER-positive disease (the commonest type of breast cancer), the breast cancer mortality rate throughout the next 15 years would be approximately halved by 6 months of anthracycline-based chemotherapy (with a combination such as FAC or FEC) followed by 5 years of adjuvant tamoxifen. For, if mortality reductions of 38% (age <50 years) and 20% (age 50-69 years) from such chemotherapy were followed by a further reduction of 31% from tamoxifen in the risks that remain, the final mortality reductions would be 57% and 45%, respectively (and, the trial results could well have been somewhat stronger if there had been full compliance with the allocated treatments). Overall survival would be comparably improved, since these treatments have relatively small effects on mortality from the aggregate of all other causes." http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15894097