Surgery Linked to Better Survival for HER2+ MBC

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Surgery Linked to Better Survival for Metastatic HER2-Positive Breast Cancer
April 8, 2019
Women diagnosed with metastatic HER2-positive breast cancer lived longer if they had surgery to remove the primary tumor in the breast. Read more...

Heidihill

Excerpt from a CNN report quoting Dr. Morrow of Sloan Kettering:

"The patients who had surgery were the ones who had better responses to chemotherapy, probably had less metastatic disease and were probably healthier," she said. "So maybe they lived longer because of surgery, or maybe they would have lived longer anyway, and the study shows that doctors know how to identify patients who will do well."

In other words, more research is needed to determine whether those factors are influencing the new study's findings, since databases -- like the one used in the new study -- can sometimes suffer from selection bias.

"The question of a benefit for surgery can only be answered by a prospective randomized trial," Morrow said.

She added that another researcher in the field, Dr. Seema Khan, a professor of cancer research at Northwestern University's Feinberg School of Medicine, has been leading such a trial.

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Stay tuned!