New hope for hormone resistant breast cancer

Thanks for the new info. I hope these new treatments are truly close to approval. I use to be a patient person, but I'm losing my patience!

The article claims the following about estrogen positive breast cancer:



"At present patients with this type of cancer typically receive anti-oestrogen therapy and generally respond well. Within 15 years, however, half develop drug resistance, followed by relapse and death."



How is this possible? HALF of estrogen receptor positive ladies DIE?



Does anyone else find this number to be extremely high and out of sync with essentially everything else out there?



I thought 80% of women SURVIVE breast cancer.



How could 50% of estrogen positive ladies (when estrogen positive represents supposedly 70% of all breast cancers) die when we're told, overall, 80% do not die?



What the hell?

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23717438

http://secondopinion-tv.org/episode/breast-cancer-recurrence

http://www.uptodate.com/contents/adjuvant-endocrine-therapy-for-non-metastatic-hormone-receptor-positive-breast-cancer

My thinking is the majority of patients dx with breast cancer are hormone receptor positive and initially dx as non-stage 4. If approx 40,000 patients die each year from breast cancer then many of these patients had a recurrence/relapse.  A recurrence with metastatic dx is what contributes to this number.  This is one of the reasons why Tamoxifen was recently approved for extended 10 year use for younger patients and then to go on further with an AI. Hormone positive patients need as much extended protection as they can get past the 5 years.  None of us is free past the 5 year mark,,,,,

http://clincancerres.aacrjournals.org/content/16/7/1979.full

http://umm.edu/health/medical/reports/articles/breast-cancer

The 2003-2009 SEER data has 5 year survival for BC confined to the breast at over 98%. These cases made up 61% of the total.



Another 32% of cases were confined to the lymph nodes and 5 year survival was over 84%.



So, for 93% of the cases, the 5 year survival was over 93%.



The remaining 7% of the cases were either Stage IV or unknown stage... and even if 5 year survival was zero (which it is not), the overall 5 year survival rate would be almost 87%



I've been led to believe the 80% survival rate is literally a survival rate and not just for 5 years.



If anyone knows different, I'm all ears.