Vaccines, adjuvant immunotherapies and palliative care in breast cancer.

Abstract

Introduction: Breast cancer constitutes 12.5% of all new cancer cases per year worldwide, the most common. Each year, about 30% of new cancer diagnoses in women are breast cancer. About 13% (about 1 in 8) of women will develop invasive breast cancer in their lifetime. In 2023, approximately 297,790 new cases of invasive breast cancer in women are expected to be diagnosed. In addition, around 2800 new cases of invasive breast cancer in men are expected to be diagnosed. Considering that for men, the lifetime risk of breast cancer is 1 in 833.

Objective: To develop a systematic review of the scientific literature published in the period 2019-2024 on vaccines, adjuvant immunotherapies and palliative care in breast cancer as a basis for the development of new oncological therapies that contribute to reducing associated morbidity and mortality, increasing quality of life and disease-free survival.

Method: A systematic review of the existing medical literature on vaccines, adjuvant immunotherapies and palliative care in breast cancer was carried out by searching articles in the PubMed, Scopus, WOS, ProQuest, Embase, Redalyc, Ovid, Medline, DynaMed and ClinicalKey databases during the period 2019-2024. Two of the authors of this research independently reviewed the literature, while one reviewer extracted the data. Two models were used to statistically combine the results, the fixed-effect model and the random-effects model.

Results: The total number of records or citations identified in the searches was 127. The total number of full-text articles analyzed to decide their eligibility was 50, the total number of excluded articles not related to the inclusion criteria or not relevant was 77 (due to limitations in the contribution of new data, publication in an impact journal, partial reports, and not having a full text of the article) and the total number of studies included in the systematic review was 12.

Conclusions: Vaccines and adjuvant immunotherapies have revolutionized the treatment and prevention of breast cancer and are aimed at molecular targets: specific proteins or antigens expressed in cancer cells, such as HER2 and MUC1, recently also against the proteins of the Apoptotic Cascade BAX and Bcl-2, which favors a personalized therapeutic approach with the aim of preventing recurrence and improving the immune response against the tumor. By maintaining continuous surveillance in the body for possible remaining cancer cells. Palliative care in breast cancer plays an essential role in controlling symptoms and improving patients' quality of life.