Background: Metastatic breast cancer (MBC) is incurable. Systemic therapy is the standard treatment; however, an optimal sequence of chemotherapy has not been established.
Objective: Evaluating effectiveness and safety of eribulin in MBC treatment and comparing the results obtained with published literature.
Methods: Observational, descriptive and retrospective study of patients with MBC treated with eribulin from 01/12/2015 to 30/10/2021. Effectiveness was analysed using Kaplan-Meier-survival-curves, for the overall number of patients treated and stratified by treatment line. Safety was measured according to adverse events (AE) based on CTCAE v5.0. Data analysis was performed using R v4.0.1.
Results: They were included in this study 53 women who received eribulin (median age 58 years). Comparison of median survival from this study versus published data were: progression-free-survival (PFS) 3 (IC95%: 3-4) versus 3.7 months and overall-survival (OS) 8 (IC95%: 3-4) versus 13.2 months for the overall number of patients. For the 1-3 line treatment group, PFS was 6 (IC95%: 3-NA) and OS was 15 (IC95%: 6-NA). There were 322 AEs, the most frequent being blood disorders 16% (52), general disorders 12% (38), and gastrointestinal disorders 12% (38).
Conclusions: The median PFS was similar to that reported previously, with lower OS. There was a tendency to achieve better results when eribulin was used earlier. Eribulin is a less well-tolerated drug than published literature.
Keywords: Eribulin; Real world data; effectiveness; metastatic breast cancer; safety.