Bogda Koczwara, Director of the Australian Research Centre for Cancer Survivorship, shared Rhea Liang’s, General and Breast Surgeon, MD Curriculum Lead at Bond University, post on LinkedIn, adding:
“In cancer survivorship, careful consideration of competing causes of mortality and morbidity is crucial to person-centered decision-making. This paper below illustrates why.”
Quoting Rhea Liang’s post:
“This is the important part: Stage 1 Breast Cancer survivors aged over 70, or with comorbidities, or experiencing polypharmacy were TEN TIMES more likely to die of something else, not the breast cancer.
And that’s despite 1 in 5 patients in this real-world/pragmatic study stopping adjuvant hormone therapy within one year and only half completing the recommended 5 years, increasing the risk of breast cancer relapse. It’s as though the patients already know the harms and faff and addition to polypharmacy of taking hormone blockers outweighs the benefits, and act accordingly.
We clinicians are not taking a holistic enough view when recommending hormonal therapy after breast cancer, and we should reconsider ‘completion of 5 years of hormone blockade’ as a marker of treatment quality in these patient populations.
Even ‘mild’ side effects can be devastating to a patient already coping with other significant health challenges.”
Title: Impact of old age, comorbidity, and polypharmacy on adjuvant endocrine therapy for patients with early-stage breast cancer
Authors: Chunhuan Lao, Marion Kuper-Hommel, Ian Campbell, Ineke Meredith, Abbey Wrigley, Ross Lawrenson
You can also read:
Sami Mansfield: GLP-1s After Breast Cancer: A Prescription Is Not a Survivorship Plan
