Study finds that many women with early breast cancer can safely skip chemo

Doctors look at breast x-rays. — (Image credit: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)

A new study has found that most women who have early-stage breast cancer might not need to go through chemotherapy, with surgery and hormone therapy being enough.

The study was presented Sunday at the American Society of Clinical Oncology meeting and published in the New England Journal of Medicine. Researchers focused on women with early-stage breast cancer that had not spread and was hormone-positive. For these patients, they typically undergo surgery and then take hormone-blocking drugs, but they are often urged to also go through chemotherapy to kill any cancer cells that remain.

During the study, the largest one ever done on breast cancer, 10,273 patients took a test called Oncotype DX, which uses a biopsy sample to see how cells are growing and how they respond to hormone therapy, in order to estimate the risk the cancer will recur, The Associated Press reports. The 17 percent of women who had high-risk scores were advised to undergo chemotherapy, while the 16 percent of patients with a low-risk score were told they could skip it. The 67 percent of women at intermediate risk were split into two groups, with all of them having surgery and hormone therapy, but one group also going through chemo.

Article continues below

The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/flexiimages/jacafc5zvs1692883516.jpg

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

After nine years, 94 percent of both groups are still alive, and 84 percent are alive without any signs of cancer, showing the chemo didn't change anything. "The impact is tremendous," Dr. Joseph Sparano of Montefiore Medical Center in New York, the study's leader, told AP. The researchers say that the findings do not apply to women who have larger tumors or whose cancer has spread, and they need to conduct studies on those patients.

Explore More

Catherine Garcia has worked as a senior writer at The Week since 2014. Her writing and reporting have appeared in Entertainment Weekly, The New York Times, Wirecutter, NBC News and "The Book of Jezebel," among others. She's a graduate of the University of Redlands and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.