Stage 4 breast cancer is the type of breast cancer that has spread out of the breast to other parts of the body like lung, bone, river, even brain. Relieving symptoms, in some cases through the use of the drug tamoxifen or radical mastectomy and extending survival time is focused on for the treatment of breast cancer stage 4. Treatment that affects the whole body is known as systemic treatment; examples of such treatment are hormonal therapy and chemotherapy. Either or both of them is often recommended to the breast cancer stage 4 patients.

Traditionally, stage 4 breast cancer has been thought as an incurable cancer. It was in the mid to late 1980’s that less than 5% of patients could expect to survive five years without their cancer recurring after breast cancer stage 4’s average patients treated with low-dose chemotherapy and survived 8-10 months before their cancer relapsed. It was in 1988 that autologus stem cell transplant were published after the result of a small clinical trial with 22 stage 4 breast cancer patient women participating and treated with high-dose chemotherapy. Without their cancer recurring beyond five years, 14% of the participant patients who were treated with high-dose chemotherapy survived. It was by 1997 that, without a relapse of their cancer, the original 14% of these patients, who had been observed more than 10 years, remain alive and appear cured of their disease. It is of importance here to understand that it is not of any usefulness to contrast the time to relapse, the average duration of survival or the response rate to chemotherapy because more than fifty percent of stage 4 breast cancer patients relapse. The assessment of the treatment strategies in breast cancer stage 4 should base on the patient’s comparison of the percent of the participant patients alive with or without relapse three to five years from the treatment to conclude whether a treatment is truly superior.