Outcome of patients with metastatic breast carcinoma treated at a private medical oncology clinic.

Metastatic breast carcinoma usually is fatal. The median survival after recurrence is 2 years. Five-year survival after recurrence is approximately 10-20%. Although encouraging data have been reported from clinical trials, two issues confound the translation of clinical research to the general medical community: patient selection bias and the absence of untreated controls. Therefore, the authors examined their community-based metastatic breast carcinoma patients, comparing their results with reports from clinical trials and with untreated historic controls. This was a nonconcurrent cohort study of 407 community-based metastatic breast carcinoma patients treated at the authors' private medical oncology clinic in northeast Louisiana. Prognostic variables were correlated with survival time. The median age of the patients at the time of diagnosis of breast carcinoma was 61 years. The median age at the time of first recurrence was 65 years. The median overall survival and median survival after recurrence were 4. 5 years and 20.1 months, respectively. The 5-year and 10-year survival rates were 17% and 2.5%, respectively. Although clinical trial participants and the authors' private practice cohort are incommensurable, outcomes in these disparate groups were similar but, unfortunately, not much different from those of untreated historic controls. Copyright 2000 American Cancer Society.