recurrence question

I'm not the same but I'm also a stage IIb. Here's what I was told:

Decision: NO additional Therapy
40 out of 100 women are alive & without cancer in 10 years
58 out of 100 women relapse
2 out of 100 die of other causes

Decision: Hormonal Therapy (doesn't apply in your case)
26 (additional) out of 100 women are alive & without cancer because of therapy

Decision: Chemotherapy
28 (additional) out of 100 women are alive & without cancer because of therapy 

Decision: Combined Therapy (doesn't apply in your case)
44 (additional) out of 100 women are alive & without cancer because of therapy  

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In your case chemo is more effective because from what I have read chemo tends to be more effective on hormone negative cancers. In my case if I only did chemo with herceptin it would only be a 68% chance of no recurrence.

Hi Lago , something is confusing for me in your post .

Do you mean with no theraphy there are more women alive ????

40 out of 100 ??

and with chemo only 28 out of 100 ??

could u please explain?

thx

Melania what it means is

40 women are still alive and NED with no additonal treatment.
with chemo 28 additional women are alive
If you add them together it means 68 woman out of 100 are alive ad NED at 10 years. (68%)

It's tough to understand without the bar graph.

For some reason, my normally sane and straightforward oncologist felt the need to "scare me" a bit with the statistics from Adjuant Online when I asked him about the stats concerning prognosis.  Advjuvant Online does not adjust for Herceptin (too new) and really CancerMath does not adjust either (except that it is based on results through 2006 and Herceptin was being used for early stage cancer at that time; just not a lot of long term data from early use), so the results, in my book, should be better once Herceptin has been figured in.  But for my IIa, 1.7 cm tumor with 2 affected nodes, he said the same as yours did Kathleen 1966:  60% chance recurrence/chemo cut it in half to 30%, but then Herceptin use affected it by approximately 50% again, bringing it to about 15% recurrence rate.  My research shows that Herceptin does reduce recurrence somewhere by about 40 - 45%, so roughly 15% makes sense.  This is also supported by the CancerMath site, even adjusted for 10 years. 

I would really like the data given early use of Herceptin, but at this point, it could only be a mathematical algorithm given that Herceptin has not been used for 10 years by early stagers.  Still, I hang on to those numbers, knowing that statistics only apply to groups, not individuals.  I have a friend who just died from pancreatic cancer - her prognosis was 5% survival, so in comparison, I will take the 85% or even 70%.  I know that must not seem like much comfort, but at least we have a fighting chance.

Hang in there and know that you are doing all that you can do to fight this.  That is what will give you the most confidence of all.

Kelly

Dear Lago and Kathy Thank you for the explanation.

Are u talkin about adjuventonline tool ? i checked mine but it does not say NED in 10 years . It just has the option of "mortality "and "relapse" choice. when i choose the rerlapse the percentage of reoccurance is high but when i choose mortality in 10 years the percentage of being alive is highr because it also encludes the ones with reoccurance. So it doesnt mean NED , right?

Adjuvent Online does exist with herceptin statistics.

 www.newadjuvent.com

BUMP