Breast Cancer Therapy: Exercising All Our Options

This issue of the Journal contains four articles important to the 70,000 women in the United States in whom node-negative breast cancer develops each year.

Abstract

This issue of the Journal contains four articles important to the 70,000 women in the United States in whom node-negative breast cancer develops each year.1 2 3 4 They provide these women with an option—an option, however, that they can reasonably exercise only within the "therapeutic window" defined in the study protocols through which thousands of women pass each month.These studies are in essence the capstone of 32 years of clinical trials of treatment for breast cancer that began with the study of the postoperative use of thiotepa by the National Surgical Adjuvant Breast and Bowel Project in 1957.5 The trials that . . .