Is mistletoe treatment beneficial in invasive breast cancer? A new approach to an unresolved problem

Abstract

Background/Aim: In this retrospective study, we compared breast cancer patients treated with and without mistletoe lectin I (ML-I) in addition to standard breast cancer treatment in order to determine a possible effect of this complementary treatment. Patients and Methods: This study included 18,528 patients with invasive breast cancer. Data on additional ML-I treatments were reported for 164 patients. We developed a “similar case” method with a distance measure retrieved from the beta variable in Cox regression to compare these patients, after stage adjustment, with their non-ML-1 treated counterparts in order to answer three hypotheses concerning overall survival, recurrence free survival and life quality. Results: Raw data analysis of an additional ML-I treatment yielded a worse outcome (p=0.02) for patients with ML treatment, possibly due to a bias inherent in the ML-I- treated patients. Using the “similar case” method (a case- based reasoning approach) we could not confirm this harm for patients using ML-I. Analysis of life quality data did not demonstrate reliable differences between patients treated with ML-I treatment and those without proven ML-I treatment. Conclusion: Based on a “similar case” model we did not observe any differences in the overall survival (OS), recurrence- free survival (RFS), and quality of life data between breast cancer patients with standard treatment and those who in addition to standard treatment received ML-I treatment.