[The effect of immunotherapy and hyperthermia on patients with advanced or recurrent breast cancer]

We treated 172 patients with advanced or recurrent breast cancer using hyperthermia or immunotherapy between July 2005 and September 2012. In these patients, standard therapy showed no results, or it was refused. Clinical benefit( complete response [CR], partial response[PR], and long stable disease [SD] for more than 6 months) was observed in 30 patients( 17.4%), including CR in 5 patients. The effective rate of immunotherapy increased from 7.7% to 26.0% using hyperthermia. The effective rate of hyperthermia was only 5.1%. The standard therapy had not been altered in 23 of the 30 patients in whom clinical benefit was observed. Thus, immunotherapy or hyperthermia had benefited these 23 patients. Of the 23 effectively treated patients, skin or regional lymph node metastases disappeared in 3 patients treated with hyperthermia alone, and lung metastases disappeared and carcinomatous pleuritis improved in 1 patient treated with immunotherapy alone. In the remaining 19 effectively treated patients, multiple metastases were observed in important solid organs such as the liver, lung, bone, and brain. Combined hyperthermia and immunotherapy was used to treat these 19 patients to good effect.