Efficacy and safety of initial five years of adjuvant endocrine therapy in postmenopausal hormone receptor-positive breast cancer: A systematic review and network meta-analysis.

Abstract

535 Background: Endocrine therapy has greatly improved the clinical outcomes of hormone receptor-positive breast cancer patients. However, there was an unmet need to identify the potentially best regimen of initial adjuvant endocrine therapy. Therefore, in this network meta-analysis, we synthesized the latest evidence to indirectly compare the efficacy and safety among different 5 years of regimens of initial adjuvant endocrine therapy. Methods: We conducted a systematic search of the PubMed, Web of Science, and EMBASE in January 2022. Randomized clinical trials assessing the efficacy and safety of initial 5 years of adjuvant endocrine therapy were included. The primary outcomes were disease-free survival (DFS) and overall survival (OS) and the secondary outcome was severe adverse effects (SAEs). A Bayesian network meta-analysis was carried out to indirectly compare all regimens and the SUCRA values were used to obtain rankings. Results: Eleven studies with 49,987 subjects were included. For DFS, exemestane (EXE) (hazard ratio [HR] 0.91, 95% confidence interval [95%CI] 0.87-0.96), anastrozole (ANA) (0.94, 0.90-0.97), letrozole (LET) (0.93, 0.89-0.97), tamoxifen (TAM) followed by EXE (0.91, 0.87-0.96), and TAM followed by ANA (0.92, 0.87-0.98) were more favorable than TAM, with TAM followed by EXE ranking as the first of SUCRA. For OS, only TAM followed by ANA showed significant superiority than TAM (HR 0.91, 95%CI 0.86-0.97) and ranked as the first of SUCRA. For SAEs, EXE (HR 1.72, 95%CI 1.04-2.98), ANA (1.58, 1.03-2.43), and LET (1.63, 1.02-2.57) showed greater associations with bone fracture than TAM. However, no significant difference in the incidences of cardiac events, thromboembolic events, and cerebrovascular events was found among all comparisons. Conclusions: The sequential use of aromatase inhibitors may be the optimal treatment mode for hormone receptor-positive postmenopausal early breast cancer patients. In addition, the three kinds of aromatase inhibitors achieved roughly equal efficacy, but caused different types of SAEs.