For women over the age of 80 with breast cancer, the chances of survival due to chemotherapy are significantly lower, says a study. "Chemotherapy's reduced effect on the risk of mortality in older breast cancer patients could be due to several factors: tumors being less sensitive to chemotherapy, a decrease in dosage as the body gets weaker with age or chemotherapy killing healthy cells in addition to cancer cells," said lead author Xianglin Du. For the study, the researchers examined data on 14,440 women diagnosed with breast cancer and 26,893 men and women diagnosed with colon cancer from 1992-2009.
All patients were over the age of 65. Among the women who had breast cancer, chemotherapy treatment reduced the risk of death from all causes by 30 percent for women between ages 65 to 69, 26 percent for women between ages 70 to 74 and 24 percent for women between ages 75 to 79. For women…
