AI Summary
The content of the article discusses a randomized clinical trial that compares the effectiveness of two treatment strategies for ERBB2-positive metastatic breast cancer. The first strategy involves using pertuzumab plus trastuzumab alone, while the second strategy adds chemotherapy to the treatment regimen. The study found that the addition of chemotherapy resulted in a longer median progression-free survival compared to the treatment without chemotherapy. However, the overall survival rates between the two strategies were not significantly different, as indicated by the wide confidence intervals.
To the Editor Huober and colleagues conducted an important analysis of a randomized clinical trial to assess if it is reasonable for patients to receive first-line pertuzumab plus trastuzumab alone (group A) vs with chemotherapy (group B) followed by trastuzumab and emtansine after progression. The median progression-free survival was 8.4 and 23.3 months for group A and group B, respectively, suggesting that patients would have impressive statistically and clinically significant treatment benefit with chemotherapy. The authors then evaluated overall survival (OS) between 2 treatment strategies based on the 2-year survival rates, which were 79.0% (90% CI, 71.4%-85.4%) for group A and 78.1% (90% CI, 70.4%-84.5%) for group B. Note that both confidence intervals were rather large, indicating that there was not enough information to assess the relative merit between the 2 arms using this summary measure for OS.