The purpose of this study was to investigate the efficacy and safety profile of vinorelbine-based chemotherapy in different settings for the treatment of breast cancer. We performed a computerized search using combinations of the following keywords: "breast cancer", "breast neoplasms", "trial", "vinorelbine" and "navelbine". A total of 20 trials were included in this analysis, with a total of 5,080 patients accrued. Taxane was associated with enhanced overall survival (OS; p = 0.027) and response rate (RR; p = 0.037) as compared with vinorelbine in monotherapy, but did not show significantly favored progression-free survival (PFS; p = 0.136). Vinorelbine alone was equivalent to fluoropyrimidine treatment in RR (p = 0.79) for the treatment of metastatic breast cancer. For vinorelbine-combined regimens, the analysis showed that the vinorelbine group gave similar results as other regimens for OS (p = 0.849) and PFS (p = 0.143). The RR of vinorelbine-combined regimens was slightly better than that of the other regimens (OR, 1.17), but the difference was not statistically significant. In neoadjuvant setting, vinorelbine treatment was as active as AC (doxorubicin, cyclophosphamide) or DAC (doxorubicin, cyclophosphamide, docetaxel) regimens with respect to RR (p = 0.76) and pathologic complete response (pCR; p = 0.77), but showed lower occurrence of grade 3/4 adverse effects. The analysis also demonstrated that vinorelbine-containing therapy is effective as adjuvant, front-line or salvage therapy of metastatic breast cancer, even for patients who were previously treated with anthracyclines or taxanes.
© 2013 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.