Despite having more extensive metastases at presentation, breast cancer patients had outcomes after brain-directed therapy similar to those of lung cancer patients, results of a retrospective, single-center study show.
The breast cancer patients had larger and more numerous brain metastases compared with the non-small-cell lung cancer (NSCLC) patients, according to study results published in JAMA Oncology.
However, median survival was not statistically different between groups, at 1.45 years for the breast cancer patients and 1.09 years for NSCLC patients (P = .06), wrote Daniel N. Cagney, MD, of Dana-Farber/Brigham and Women’s Cancer Center, Harvard Medical School, Boston, and his coauthors.
“This finding suggests that intracranial disease in patients with breast cancer was not more aggressive or resistant to treatment, but rather was diagnosed at a later stage,” noted Dr. Cagney and his colleagues.
They described a retrospective analysis of 349 patients with breast cancer and 659 patients with NSCLC, all treated between 2000 and 2015 at Dana-Farber/Brigham and Women’s Cancer Center.
Median metastasis diameter at presentation was 17 mm for the breast cancer patients, compared with 14 mm for the lung cancer patients (P less than .001). Breast cancer patients were significantly more likely to be symptomatic, have seizures, harbor brainstem involvement, and have leptomeningeal disease at the time of diagnosis, the researchers wrote.
“After initial brain-directed therapy, no significant differences in recurrence or treatment-based intracranial outcomes were found between the two groups,” they noted. However, neurological death was seen in 37.3% of the breast cancer group versus 19.9% of the lung cancer group (P less than .001).