Evaluating the benefits and adverse effects of an enthracycline-taxane-capecitabine combined regimen in patients with early breast cancer

Capecitabine in addition to anthracycline-taxane based regimens for patients with early breast cancer (EBC) has been reported in previous clinical trials, but the reported efficacy of this regimen remained inconsistent. In order to clarify the survival benefit of this regimen, a meta-analysis was performed. The systematic literature search was conducted in PubMed, the Cochrane library and Google scholar. The hazard ratios (HRs) were used to evaluate the efficacy and adverse events. The result indicated that capecitabine combine with an anthracycline-taxane based regimen would significantly improve DFS (HR = 0.87, 95% CI 0.77–0.97) and OS (HR = 0.78, 95% CI 0.66–0.91) compared with the controls. In subgroup analysis, we found that capecitabine improved the DFS in hormone receptor negative (HR = 0.72, 95% CI 0.53–0.92) and triple negative (HR = 0.67, 95% CI 0.49–0.86) EBC patients. However, adding capecitabine might also increase the occurrence of some side-effects, such as hand-foot syndrome, stomatitis and diarrhea. Capecitabine combined with an anthracycline-taxane based regimen maybe effective and well-tolerated by patients with EBC, especially for triple negative breast cancer, and might be a good clinical choice.