Research Paper Volume 13, Issue 15 pp 19835—19866
Bisphosphonates and breast cancer survival: a meta-analysis and trial sequential analysis of 81508 participants from 23 prospective epidemiological studies
- 1 Department of Preventive Medicine, School of Public Health and Management, Wenzhou Medical University, Wenzhou, China
- 2 Department of Medical Oncology, Harbin Medical University Cancer Hospital, Harbin, China
- 3 Department of Microbiology, School of Public Health, Harbin Medical University Cancer Hospital, Harbin, China
- 4 Department of Epidemiology, School of Public Health, Harbin Medical University, Harbin, China
Received: December 5, 2020 Accepted: June 19, 2021 Published: August 10, 2021
https://doi.org/10.18632/aging.203395How to Cite
Copyright: © 2021 Liu et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY 3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Abstract
Background: We assessed the effect of bisphosphonates (BPs) on breast cancer (BCa) patient survival and explored how long the effect can persist after treatment.
Methods: We performed a meta-analysis and trial sequential analysis (TSA) of prospective studies including randomized controlled trials (RCTs) and cohort studies. We performed extensive sensitivity analyses to assess the robustness of the findings.
Results: Seventeen RCTs and eight cohorts with 81508 BCa patients were identified. A significant beneficial effect of BPs on BCa survival was found (RR, 0.725; 95% CI, 0.627-0.839), and the TSA results also suggested firm evidence for this beneficial effect. Both summarized results from RCTs and cohorts provided firm evidence for this effect, although the effect estimates were stronger from cohorts than RCTs (RR, 0.892; 95% CI, 0.829-0.961; 0.570; 95% CI, 0.436-0.745; respectively). This beneficial effect was confirmed for bone-metastases (RR, 0.713; 95% CI, 0.602-0.843) and postmenopausal women (RR, 0.737; 95% CI, 0.640-0.850). Importantly, our results demonstrated that this beneficial effect was retained at least 1-2 years after treatment completion (RR, 0.780; 95% CI, 0.638-0.954) and could persist for up to more than 4 years after treatment completion (RR, 0.906; 95% CI, 0.832-0.987). Extensive sensitivity analyses showed the robustness of our results. The GRADE quality of evidence was generally judged to be moderate to high.
Conclusions: The present study provides firm evidence for a significant beneficial effect of BPs on BCa survival in patients with early-stage BCa, and this effect was retained at least 1-2 years after BP treatment completion.