Clinical Outcome of Turkish Metastatic Breast Cancer Patients with Currently Available Treatment Modalities - Single Center Experience

Background: Breast cancer is the most common malignancy and the second leading cause of cancer-relateddeath among women in the developed countries. Despite advances in screening, improved local therapies andadjuvant systemic treatments, median survival of metastatic breast cancer patients (MBC) is in the range of 2-3years at most. We aimed to investigate whether the prognostic factors and therapeutic responses of our Turkishpatients are similar to those in the literature. Materials and
Methods: We reviewed the medical records of MBCpatients who had been treated in our institution between 1999-2009 and analyzed their clinicopathological featuresand survival outcomes retrospectively
Results: A hundred and sixty patients were included. Median age was47 (23-82), median follow up was 24 (2-186) months. At the time of diagnosis 59% of patients were under theage of 50 and 46% were postmenopausal. The majority (37%) had multiple sites of metastases. Forty percentreceived endocrine therapy and 40% chemotherapy as first line metastatic treatment. Thirty (20%) patientswere treated with molecular targeting agents like trastuzumab, lapatinib and sunitinib, frequently combinedwith a chemotherapy agent. Five-year overall survival (OS) was 32% and median OS was 38 months for thewhole group. Five year progression free survival (PFS) was 10% and median PFS was 10 months. Menopausalstatus, hormone receptor expression and disease free status had a significant impact on overall survival in themultivariate analysis (p 0.018, p 0.018 and p:0.003, respectively).
Conclusions: All our patients were treated withthe modern oncologic therapies recommended by the international guidelines. From our data, MBC patientslive up to 3-4 years, indicating that further improvement beyond that requires development of new treatmentmodalities. The survival outcomes of our patients were consistent with the data reported in the literature.