FRIDAY, Nov. 7, 2025 (HealthDay News) — Women diagnosed with advanced breast cancer can now expect to live an extra six or seven months compared to about a decade ago, researchers report.

This increase in survival time coincides with the development of more effective treatments for advanced breast cancer, as well as wider improvements in diagnosis and quality of care, researchers said.

In particular, women with breast cancers driven by known biological factors have seen a dramatic improvement in their outlook, thanks to better targeted therapies.

“Survival time for patients with advanced breast cancer, where the cancer has spread to other parts of the body, is much lower compared to early breast cancer,” senior researcher Dr. Fatima Cardoso said in a news release. She’s president of the Advanced Breast Cancer Global Alliance in Lisbon.

“The major treatments for this stage of breast cancer are systemic therapies, like hormone therapy, chemotherapy and targeted therapy, that aim to kill cancer cells wherever they are growing in the body,” Cardoso said. “In the last 15 years, we have seen a number of new systemic therapies developed and become available to some patients.”

For the new study, researchers tracked more than 60,000 patients treated for advanced breast cancer between 2011 and 2025. The team broke patients’ data down into three-year blocks based on when treatment started so they could compare average survival over time.

Overall, average survival was nearly 28 months for breast cancer patients who began systemic treatment between 2011 and 2013, results showed.

That rose to more than 34 months for patients who started treatment between 2020 and 2022, researchers said.

Researchers also broke the data down into the main subtypes of breast cancer — whether the cancer is fueled by a signaling protein called human epidermal growth factor receptor 2 (HER2+) or by estrogen and progesterone hormone receptors (HR+):

• People with HER2+/HR+ advanced breast cancer had the longest survival times — 42 months on average at the start and 53 months by the end of the study.

• Patients with HER2+/HR- breast cancer also had a significant increase in survival, from 33 months to 52 months.

• Those with HER2-/HR+ breast cancers have had a more gradual increase, from just under 32 months to more than 39 months.

Survival time was lowest among “triple negative” breast cancer (those driven neither by HER2 nor female hormones), about 11 months at the start, to a little more than 13 months now.

Cardoso noted that patients with HER2- or hormone-driven cancers have benefitted from new targeted treatments over the past decade.

“We knew that some of these treatments prolong life for patients treated in clinical trials, but this study suggests that they are also effective in ‘real-world’ patients who can access them, with important improvements in survival,” she said.

“More recently, some much-needed new therapies for triple negative breast cancer, such as immune checkpoint inhibitors, PARP inhibitors and antibody-drug conjugates, have been developed and approved,” Cardoso added. “We expect that their positive effect on survival will become more visible in the next few years.”

Dr. Eric Winer, director of the Yale Cancer Center, reviewed the findings.

“These results are positive for people who are being diagnosed with advanced breast cancer today; they can expect to live longer, compared to patients diagnosed 10 or even five years ago,” said Winer, who was not involved in the research.

“However, results have improved more for some types of breast cancer than others, and we still have a tremendous amount of work ahead,” he added in a news release. “The outcome for many patients, such as those with triple negative breast cancer, is still highly variable.”

Researchers presented their findings Thursday at the Advanced Breast Cancer Eighth International Consensus Conference in Lisbon.

Findings presented at medical meetings should be considered preliminary until published in a peer-reviewed journal.

More information

The American Cancer Society has more about breast cancer.

SOURCE: Advanced Breast Cancer Eighth International Consensus Conference, news release, Nov. 6, 2025