[Current status of adjuvant chemotherapy for breast cancer]

Breast cancer is one of the most common malignancies among Japanese women. Approximately 40,000 new patients are diagnosed annually. In the USA, however,the mortality from breast cancer has recently been declining. A nationwide screening promotion using mammography, and recent advances in the treatment for early breast cancer have been the main reasons. It was widely accepted that for breast cancer as a systemic disease, appropriate systemic treatment of either chemotherapy and endocrine therapy improved the survival. We describe here the contributions of new agents to the improvement in survival for breast cancer patients and introduced the concept of dose density.