There are several options for MBC patients who are responding to chemotherapy, to continue treatment with a fix number of cycles or until disease progression which also known as maintenance chemotherapy (MCT), to stop chemotherapy and take a watch and wait strategy, or to stop chemotherapy and start the maintenance endocrine therapy (MET) for hormone receptor (HR) positive patients. Since the role of maintenance therapy in prolonging the overall survival (OS) and progression-free survival (PFS) of MBC was controversial in previous studies, the investigators performed a systematic review of randomized controlled trials to detect the association of survival with maintenance therapy in patients with MBC after first-line chemotherapy. And the investigators further performed a multi-center retrospective real-world study to evaluate these two maintenance modalities.
