High dose chemotherapy offers little benefit in breast cancer

The use of high dose chemotherapy with bone marrow rescue for women with breast cancer seems to offer little improvement in outcome compared with standard chemotherapy.

Early, disappointing, results from international trials were presented at the 35th annual meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncology in Atlanta, Georgia, last week. In the United States, high dose chemotherapy, followed by autologous bone marrow or stem cell rescue, has become almost standard treatment for women with high risk breast cancer. This approach has been adopted despite a lack of evidence showing that this more toxic procedure confers any significant benefit over the use of standard dose chemotherapy.

In the United Kingdom, the only centres offering women the opportunity to …