Critical Analysis for trastuzumab therapy

Critical Analysis for trastuzumab therapy

Introduction

This research paper is about trastuzumab therapy, a therapy which has yielded some great results for the patients suffering from breast cancers, whose tumors exhibit HER-2 protein over-expression or gene amplification. There are an extensive amount of tests techniques that are currently available in the hospitals to identify the patients for trastuzumab. In this research paper the major focus of the team was to develop a cost effective measures and techniques for the testing and treatment of the disease (Slamon et al, 1987).

The research is highly pertinent because the problem of breast cancer have taken a great hype in past few years specifically in the United States of America, it is estimated that out of eight women one women is suffering from this epidemic over the course of her lifetime. Along, with that most of the women that become a target of this epidemic does not possess the resources or the facilities to effectively treat the epidemic. This is the reason why this research was conducted to find out some alternative and cost effective methods diagnosis and treatment of the epidemic among women.

Methodology

The researchers used the state transition model for the stimulation of clinical practice inside the hypothetical cohort suffering from the epidemic of breast cancer. The patients included in the research were over sixty five years; the outcomes of the research were based on the lifetime cost, incremental cost effective ratio, and quality of life years of the patients suffering from the epidemic. The testing techniques that are evaluated in this paper includes the fluorescence in situ hybridization (FISH) alone, and HercepTest (DAKO, Carpinteria, CA) immunohistochemical assay alone, both the tests were followed by chemotherapy and the trastuzumab therapy for the treatment of patients who were tested positive, and chemotherapy alone therapy was used for the patients whose test results were negative.

There are two testing techniques which are used by the researchers for the diagnosis of patients suffering from breast cancer. Once the evaluation was done the researchers found that among the two IHC is more feasible, inexpensive and cost effective as compared to FISH. This is the main reason why IHC is used by many hospitals for the identification of breast cancer among the patients; along with being inexpensive this test is readily available inside clinical laboratories, yields the result in a lesser amount of time, and is easily performed. Whereas, on the other hand FISH is much more time consuming, and expensive which is the reason why this test is not available inside all clinical laboratories. Despite of all these constraints FISH is much more appealing due to its quantitative and objective system of scoring. Another important fact about FISH is that it is more predictive as compared to IHC.

Economic evaluation method used

The economic evaluation methods used by the authors during the research were highly appropriate as the authors used a systematic overview of the previous literature and researches, for the identification of relevant research objective ...