Breast cancer: chemotherapy in the treatment of advanced disease.

Chemotherapy in patients with advanced breast cancer remains palliative. Although the majority of patients will experience an initial response or stabilisation of the disease, the survival is only modestly improved. The search for new drugs and more effective combinations must therefore continue. High-dose chemotherapy with or without autologous bone marrow transplant (ABMT) is an enthusiastic perspective of progress but the available data do not permit conclusions about the effectiveness of high-dose therapy compared with conventional treatment.