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Extending endocrine therapy (ET) in premenopausal women with node-positive, HR+ early breast cancer who remained premenopausal after 5 years of treatment with luteinizing hormone-releasing hormone agonists led to significant reductions in breast cancer recurrence, according to a cohort study.
Ann Partridge, MD, MPH, of Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Harvard Medical School in Boston, and colleagues analyzed prospective data on 501 premenopausal women diagnosed with breast cancer at age 40 or younger. Approximately half of these received extended ET for a median duration of 3.7 years.
As the team reported in the Journal of Clinical Oncology, at a median 7.3 years of follow-up, the invasive breast cancer–free survival rate was 85% in the extended therapy group compared with 78% in the non-extended group (HR 0.63, P=0.0135). The distant recurrence-free survival rate at 5 years was also higher in the extended therapy group (91% vs 83%, [HR 0.49, P=0.0030]).
"We found that extending ET beyond the fifth year in premenopausal patients with node-positive hormone receptor–positive early breast cancer was associated with a clinically meaningful reduction in the risk of an invasive breast cancer recurrence and improved distant recurrence-free survival," the researchers concluded.
