Adjuvant endocrine treatment (goserelin vs tamoxifen) in pre-menopausal patients with operable node positive stage II breast cancer. A prospective randomized national multicenter study

What Was Tested

This randomized controlled trial paper looks at Goserelin.

To evaluate possible differences in effect on time to recurrence and overall survival in node positive pre-menopausal breast cancer patients (age < or = 50 years) receiving LHRH analogue or tamoxifen as adjuvant endocrine treatment.

Who Took Part

The abstract describes 1994, patients taking part.

By PubMed's age tags, the people studied were adults and middle-aged adults, women only.

Between January 1989 and July 1994, 320 patients with node positive (pN(+)) and hormone receptor positive or receptor status unknown tumors were included and randomized in a national multicenter study to receive either tamoxifen or goserelin as adjuvant treatment for two years.

Primary surgical treatment was employed according to current standards.

How the Study Was Run

The researchers set it up as a randomized and multicenter study.

Random assignment meant chance, not the researchers, decided who got Goserelin and who got the comparison, which limits bias.

Running at several centres spread the Goserelin study over different clinics and patient groups.

The timeline in the abstract includes two years.

Final follow-up was completed as of December 2000.

Time to events were estimated by the Kaplan-Meier method, and compared by the log rank test.

What Was Measured

The subject headings attached to it are Antineoplastic Agents, Hormonal, Antineoplastic Combined Chemotherapy Protocols, Breast Neoplasms, Goserelin, Neoplasm Staging, Recurrence and Risk Factors.

What This Means in Plain Language

The paper is a randomized and multicenter study of Goserelin in 1994, patients over two years.

With several hundred people or more, it is a fairly large study for this kind of research.

Results are reported in around 3 sentences of the abstract; we leave them to the paper itself rather than summarise them.

The publication is from 2002 (European journal of surgical oncology : the journal of the European Society of Surgical Oncology and the British Association of Surgical Oncology), a journal based in England.

More context: the Goserelin compound page, all human trials.