Loading...
Strategies for reducing breast cancer recurrence in women who are at high risk have been based on tumor size, axillary nodal involvement, and biologic characteristics of the tumor. Although adjuvant chemotherapy clearly has affected clinical outcomes of such patients positively, the limitations of adjuvant chemotherapy are demonstrated too frequently in the women with the greatest axillary nodal burden of metastatic disease.
Two decades have passed since bone marrow–ablative courses of chemotherapy plus autologous bone marrow transplantation (and, later, hematopoietic stem-cell transplantation) were first touted as being beneficial for some patients with breast cancer. Early enthusiasm for this approach was based on nonrandomized pilot studi…