© 2006 European Society for Medical Oncology
editorial |
The cost of life: should it matter to doctors?
Director, Medical Oncology 1, Istituto Nazionale Tumori, Via Vneenzian 1, 20133 – Milano, Italy
(E-mail: luca.gianni@istitutotumori.mi.it)
| The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below. |
Is there a tag-price on patients' life? Would such a price be any business of doctors? The rapidly evolving success of the adjuvant use of the HER-2 directed monoclonal antibody trastuzumab and an article appearing in today's issue of Annals of Oncology [1
] raise the above and many more issues.
With rare unison the interim analyses of four large-scale independent prospective studies (NSABP-B31, NCCTG-N9831, HERA and BCIRG-006) have reported in the past few months that adjuvant trastuzumab either given with or after chemotherapy, and administered either weekly or three-weekly reduces the risk of early recurrence by almost 50% even at less than 2 years of follow up [2–4]. Decades of clinical research to improve the outcome of women who incur breast cancer have hardly if ever witnessed such a success story before.
In urging caution and a cool-headedness before embracing adjuvant trastuzumab as standard of care in
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