Clinical efficacy of including capecitabine in neoadjuvant chemotherapy for breast cancer: a systematic review and meta-analysis of randomized controlled trials

Capecitabine has proven effective as a chemotherapy for metastatic breast cancer. Though several Phase II/III studies of capecitabine as neoadjuvant chemotherapy have been conducted, the results still remain inconsistent. Therefore, we performed a meta-analysis to obtain more precise understanding o...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:	PloS one 2013-01, Vol.8 (1), p.e53403
Main Authors:	Li, Qiuyun, Jiang, Yi, Wei, Wei, Yang, Huawei, Liu, Jianlun
Format:	Article
Language:	eng
Subjects:	Adjuvant chemotherapy Adjuvant treatment Anthracycline Anthracyclines - administration & dosage Biology Biopsy Breast cancer Breast Neoplasms - drug therapy Cancer Cancer therapies Capecitabine Care and treatment Chemotherapy Clinical trials Deoxycytidine - administration & dosage Deoxycytidine - analogs & derivatives Dosage and administration Drug therapy Female Fluorouracil - administration & dosage Fluorouracil - analogs & derivatives Health risks Humans Lumpectomy Medical ethics Medical research Medicine Meta-analysis Metastases Metastasis Models, Statistical Neoadjuvant Therapy - methods Neoplasm Metastasis Patients Randomization Randomized Controlled Trials as Topic Risk Assessment Studies Surgery Systematic review Taxanes Taxoids - administration & dosage Treatment Outcome
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Summary:	Capecitabine has proven effective as a chemotherapy for metastatic breast cancer. Though several Phase II/III studies of capecitabine as neoadjuvant chemotherapy have been conducted, the results still remain inconsistent. Therefore, we performed a meta-analysis to obtain more precise understanding of the role of capecitabine in neoadjuvant chemotherapy for breast cancer patients. The electronic database PubMed and online abstracts from ASCO and SABCS were searched to identify randomized clinical trials comparing neoadjuvant chemotherapy with or without capecitabine in early/operable breast cancer patients without distant metastasis. Risk ratios were used to estimate the association between capecitabine in neoadjuvant chemotherapy and various efficacy outcomes. Fixed- or random-effect models were adopted to pool data in RevMan 5.1. Five studies were included in the meta-analysis. Neoadjuvant use of capecitabine with anthracycline and/or taxane based therapy was not associated with significant improvement in clinical outcomes including: pathologic complete response in breast (pCR; RR = 1.10, 95% CI 0.87-1.40, p = 0.43), pCR in breast tumor and nodes (tnpCR RR = 0.99, 95% CI 0.83-1.18, p = 0.90), overall response rate (ORR; RR = 1.00, 95% CI 0.94-1.07, p = 0.93), or breast-conserving surgery (BCS; RR = 0.98, 95% CI 0.93-1.04, p = 0.49). Neoadjuvant treatment of breast cancer involving capecitabine did not significantly improve pCR, tnpCR, BCS or ORR. Thus adding capecitabine to neoadjuvant chemotherapy regimes is unlikely to improve outcomes in breast cancer patients without distant metastasis. Further research is required to establish the condition that capecitabine may be useful in breast cancer neoadjuvant chemotherapy.
ISSN:	1932-6203 1932-6203