International Federation of Gynecology and Obstetrics

Women's health research has shown using two anti-HER2 drugs appears to be better than one in preoperative treatment for nonmetastatic early stage breast cancer.

A team from Massachusetts General Hospital in the US led by chief of Oncology Dr Jose Baselga enrolled 455 patients across 23 countries into a randomised trial in which different medications were evaluated for effectiveness.

Some participants were given intravenous trastuzumab, others received oral lapatinib and a third group took both treatments for six weeks.

All subjects were then given a weekly dose of paclitaxel (Taxol) in addition to these regimes for a further 12 weeks.

None of the patients had been treated before the trial and all of them had HER2-positive breast tumours when they started.

They had tumours surgically removed within four weeks of completing paclitaxel treatment, followed by chemotherapy and another year of the same anti-HER2 therapy they received at the start of the study.

More than half of those who took a combination of trastuzumab and lapatinib had no visible cancer cells in removed tissue compared with less than a third of patients on only one drug.

The study, which was published in the Lancet, was supported by lapatinib manufacturer GlaxoSmithKline.

A Cedars-Sinai Medical Center study in Los Angeles, US, recently found a link between reduced breast cancer risk and the moderate consumption of red wine.

Posted by David Smith