Little Benefit to Extensive Breast Cancer Monitoring

Disease monitoring in patients with metastatic breast cancer (MBC) is used predominantly to gauge the efficacy or toxicity of a given therapy. However, intense monitoring has not been shown to improve outcomes, and practice guidelines generally fail to stipulate, in absolute terms, the composition of disease monitoring tests (imaging, tumor markers, etc.) or the frequency at which they should be done.

To evaluate patterns and predictors of extreme use of disease-monitoring serum tumor marker (STM) tests and imaging studies in women with MBC, investigators conducted a population-based analysis of 2460 patients in the SEER-Medicare database who underwent disease monitoring between 2002 and 2011. Billing information was used to identify the use…