(ANSA) - ROME, NOVEMBER 30 - 93% of patients with breast cancer positively evaluate the extension of adjuvant therapy, ie after surgery, to reduce the risk of relapse.
But more than 80% fear delays in the availability in Italy of new treatments capable of improving survival.
These are the main results of the survey conducted on about 130 patients on health care in the post Covid, presented today as part of a sensitization project on adjuvant therapy, carried out with the unconditional support of Pierre Fabre.
"Every year, in Italy, almost 55 thousand women receive the diagnosis of breast cancer, the most frequent neoplasm in the entire population - explains Francesco Cognetti, president of the Together Against Cancer Foundation -. The adjuvant therapy of the radically operated disease can be considered one of the greatest successes in oncology in the last thirty years. Thanks to this, in fact, despite the constant increase in cases, mortality has decreased by 6.8% compared to 2015 ".
Adjuvant treatments are proposed on the basis of the individual case study. In patients with tumors characterized by HER2 overexpression, adjuvant treatment with chemotherapy, hormone therapy and one year of biological therapy is the standard of care. "This improved survival, making HER2 positive healable in the vast majority of patients, but did not eliminate the risk of cancer returning, which occurs in about one in five cases. So in this population, there is a strong unmet clinical need to reduce the risk of relapse, progression and death ". Most relapses, Cognetti points out, "have an inevitable course towards metastatic disease. This is why the enhancement of adjuvant therapies is thethe only way to reduce the chances of relapse.
Recent studies have shown that innovative drugs, added to standard therapies in the 15-20% of patients who have not yet healed, are able to further reduce relapses after 5 years ". (ANSA).