A trial comparing adjuvant chemotherapy with standard treatment for older women with early stage breast cancer (ACTION)

This trial was looking at chemotherapy after surgery for breast cancer in women over the age of 70. This trial was supported by Cancer Research UK.

Women with early stage breast cancer often have chemotherapy after surgery. This is called adjuvant treatment. Doctors use adjuvant chemotherapy when they think there is a significant risk that the cancer could come back in the future.

Adjuvant chemotherapy increases survival from breast cancer and reduces the chances of it returning in younger women. But there hadn't been many trials that had looked at how well chemotherapy worked for women over 70. Researchers thought that chemotherapy would stop or delay breast cancer coming back in older women, but they didn’t know for sure.

Doctors usually give chemotherapy for breast cancer every 3 weeks. But having it more often may work better. You would normally have a break between each chemotherapy treatment because it can cause a drop in your blood count, increasing your risk of infections. If you have chemotherapy more often, a drug called GCSF can stimulate white blood cells to grow back more quickly.

The aims of this trial were to

• Find out how well adjuvant chemotherapy worked for women over 70 years of age who had early stage breast cancer
• Find out if having chemotherapy was acceptable to older women
• Learn more about the side effects of having chemotherapy every 3 weeks or having chemotherapy and GCSF every 2 weeks