Evaluation of the Effect of Combination Chemotherapy with Five-Day Infusion of Fluorouracil Plus Vinorelbine in Pretreated Metastatic Breast Cancer Patients

Abstract

Although metastatic breast cancer is unlikely to be cured, meaningful improvements in survival have been seen, coincident with the introduction of newer systemic therapies. Median overall survival (OS) now is slightly over three years, with a range from a few months to many years. Then the primary goals of systemic treatment for metastatic breast cancer are prolongation of survival, alleviation of symptoms, and maintenance or improvement in quality of life, with combination chemotherapy (rather than single agent sequential therapy) is most appropriate when the higher chance of response is assessed to be more important than the potential for higher treatment toxicity. In this retrospective study we analysed the medical records of 54 metastatic breast cancer patients presented to El-Salam Oncology Centre and Clinical oncology department at Ain-Shams University hospitals in the period from 1-7- 2013 till 30-6-2018 who were treated with 5-flurouracil (600 mg/m2 per day) continuous infusion D1 – D5 plus vinorelbine (25 mg/m2) D1 and D5 every 3 weeks cycle. Many parameters were addressed with patient’s median age was 46.5 years and 61% of patients were premenopausal, most of them had visceral mets 64.8%, half of them had received 6 cycles of this regimen and all of them had received one or more line of chemotherapy in metastatic setting. In our study Clinical Benefit Rate (CBR) was 45 patients (83.3 %) with statistical significance correlations with both TND molecular subtypes and receiving Nav/5Fu as 2nd line in metastatic setting, median Progression Free Survival (PFS) was 6.8 months and median Overall Survival (OS) was 25.8 months. So with its low toxicity profile and lower cost, this regimen appears to exert significant activity in breast cancer patients previously submitted to chemotherapy with higher response when it is at earlier line.