High dose chemotherapy in inflammatory breast cancer

Excerpt

Inflammatory breast cancer (IBC) is an uncommon disease, accounting for 2-4% of all breast cancers, but has an aggressive clinical course and a poor prognosis. Single modality therapy (eg radiotherapy or surgery) lead to dismal 5 year survival rates of under 10%. The introduction of primary chemotherapy has improved 5 year survival to around 30-50%, but further improvement is required. Since some studies show that responding patients do much better than non-responding patients, and in particular, that a pathological complete remission (CR) is an important good prognostic factor, it seems reasonable to attempt to improve the efficacy of the primary chemotherapy regimen. One such approach is the use of high dose chemotherapy - a strategy that is also being investigated in both the metastatic and the adjuvant setting. …