© 2005 Oxford University Press
EDITORIAL |
Dose Density in Breast Cancer: A Simple Message?
Affiliation of authors: Department of Medical Oncology (NUL, EPW) and Department of Biostatistics and Computational Biology (RG), Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Boston, MA
Correspondence to: Eric P. Winer, MD, Department of Medical Oncology, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, 44 Binney Street, Boston, MA 02115 (e-mail: ewiner@partners.org).
| The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below. |
"Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not one bit simpler."
—Albert Einstein
In the 1970s, Norton and Simon (1), applying Gompertzian principles to cancer cell growth, hypothesized that maximal chemotherapy effectiveness could be achieved by scheduling the interval of chemotherapy to correspond to the period of most rapid tumor growth. As an outgrowth of this initial work, several pilot trials and two large randomized trials were conducted to test the feasibility and effectiveness of what has come to be called dose-dense chemotherapy. The Cancer and Leukemia Group B (CALGB) trial 9741, which was conducted in the North American Intergroup (2), provided support to Norton and Simon's hypothesis by demonstrating that a change in the interval of anthracycline- and taxane-based chemotherapy, from every 3 weeks to every 2 weeks, improved disease-free and overall survival in women with lymph node–positive, early-stage breast cancer.