Is Mistletoe Treatment Beneficial in Invasive Breast Cancer? A New Approach to an Unresolved Problem

In this retrospective study, we compared breast cancer patients treated with and without mistletoe lectin I (ML-I) in addition to standard breast cancer treatment in order to determine a possible effect of this complementary treatment. This study included 18,528 patients with invasive breast cancer....

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Veröffentlicht in:Anticancer research 2018-03, Vol.38 (3), p.1585-1593
Hauptverfasser: Fritz, Peter, Dippon, Jürgen, Müller, Simon, Goletz, Sven, Trautmann, Christian, Pappas, Xenophon, Ott, German, Brauch, Hiltrud, Schwab, Matthias, Winter, Stefan, Mürdter, Thomas, Brinkmann, Friedhelm, Faisst, Simone, Rössle, Susanne, Gerteis, Andreas, Friedel, Godehard
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Sprache:eng
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Zusammenfassung:In this retrospective study, we compared breast cancer patients treated with and without mistletoe lectin I (ML-I) in addition to standard breast cancer treatment in order to determine a possible effect of this complementary treatment. This study included 18,528 patients with invasive breast cancer. Data on additional ML-I treatments were reported for 164 patients. We developed a "similar case" method with a distance measure retrieved from the beta variable in Cox regression to compare these patients, after stage adjustment, with their non-ML-1 treated counterparts in order to answer three hypotheses concerning overall survival, recurrence free survival and life quality. Raw data analysis of an additional ML-I treatment yielded a worse outcome (p=0.02) for patients with ML treatment, possibly due to a bias inherent in the ML-I-treated patients. Using the "similar case" method (a case-based reasoning approach) we could not confirm this harm for patients using ML-I. Analysis of life quality data did not demonstrate reliable differences between patients treated with ML-I treatment and those without proven ML-I treatment. Based on a "similar case" model we did not observe any differences in the overall survival (OS), recurrence-free survival (RFS), and quality of life data between breast cancer patients with standard treatment and those who in addition to standard treatment received ML-I treatment.
ISSN:0250-7005
1791-7530
DOI:10.21873/anticanres.12388