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Treatment of Breast Cancer in the Elderly

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Abstract

Despite the fact that the US population is aging and the numbers of older patients with breast cancer are increasing, many questions remain on how to optimally treat this patient population. Accrual of older cancer patients to clinical trials has been stagnant, and consequently, evidence-based recommendations are often limited by a lack of prospective data to inform decisions. Increasingly, one’s functional status has been recognized as a critical factor in predicting for treatment toxicity, and tools such as the geriatric assessment will likely become a routine part of clinical practice over time. Here, adjuvant treatment considerations for older patients will be reviewed, including what is known about treatment efficacy, utilization patterns, and toxicity for older breast cancer patients. Improving enrollment of older patients onto clinical trials should be a national priority; it is only through prospective assessment that we can improve our approaches to treating our older patients with cancer.

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Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Dr. Gunter von Minckwitz who graciously provided slides from his presentation of the ICE trial at the San Antonio Breast Cancer Research Symposium (December 2014). I would also like to thank Drs. Arti Hurria, Hyman Muss, and Eric Winer for their mentorship on the care of older patients with breast cancer.

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Conflict of Interest

Rachel A. Freedman is the PI for two studies that receive institutional funding from Puma Biotechnology and Genentech but she does not receive any personal funding from these companies.

Human and Animal Rights and Informed Consent

This article does not contain any studies with human or animal subjects performed by any of the authors.

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  1. Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, 450 Brookline Avenue, Boston, MA, 02215, USA

    Rachel A. Freedman

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Correspondence to Rachel A. Freedman.

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This article is part of the Topical Collection on Breast Cancer

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Freedman, R.A. Treatment of Breast Cancer in the Elderly. Curr Oncol Rep 17, 51 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11912-015-0475-8

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