Work

Efficacy of adjuvant capecitabine in triple-negative breast cancer with residual disease after neoadjuvant therapy: a real-world study

Year: 2025

Type: article

Abstract: PURPOSE: To determine the beneficiaries of capecitabine in patients with triple-negative breast cancer (TNBC) who failed to achieve pathological complete response (pCR) by analyzing the efficacy of the drug in different HER2 statuses and TNM stages. METHODS: The Kaplan-Meier survival curve was plotted to estimate the effect of capecitabine therapy on disease-free survival (DFS) and overall survival (OS). Furthermore, the Cox proportional hazards model was used to analyze the factors that influence DFS and OS. RESULTS: A total of 296 patients with TNBC who had non-pCR after undergoing neoadjuvant therapy (NAT) were included in this study. There were 152 patients (51.4 %) in the capecitabine group and 144 patients (48.6 %) in the no-capecitabine group. The 3-year DFS and OS rates of the capecitabine group were better than those of the no-capecitabine group (DFS 80.0 % vs. 68.0 % p = 0.012, OS 95.9 % vs. 86.9 % p = 0.011). In addition, the capecitabine group exhibited significantly better DFS and OS than the no-capecitabine group in the HER2-low (DFS p = 0.004, OS p = 0.009) and stage III (DFS p = 0.004, OS p = 0.008) populations but not in the HER2-0 or stage II population. CONCLUSION: Adjuvant capecitabine therapy significantly improved the prognosis of patients with TNBC who had residual disease after NAT, and the improvements in the outcomes were significant in patients with HER2-low expression and stage III disease. Other effective treatment methods should be explored for patients with HER2-0 expression or stage II disease.

Source: The Breast

DOI: 10.1016/j.breast.2025.104477