| Summary: | 碩士 === 國立成功大學 === 公共衛生研究所 === 105 === The aim of this study is to explore the utilization of Chinese herbal products (CHPs) among female breast cancer patients during the period of receiving treatment of chemotherapeutic agents, or, within ten half-lives of these agents. This study was a population-based study using random sampled data obtained from the National Health Insurance Research Database in Taiwan between 2002 and 2013. There were 2,854 female patients with newly diagnosed breast cancer receiving chemotherapeutic agents after diagnosis. Among them, 2,233(78.24%) of them used CHP at least once after diagnosis. There were higher proportions of high education and young age among CHP users compared with non-users. There were 571 patients who received 137,894 CHP prescriptions with potential herb-drug interactions. The most frequently co-prescribed chemotherapeutic agents was cyclophosphamide (24.0%), followed by epirubicin (17.9%). Among these co-prescriptions, about 90% of CHP were prescribed within five half-lives of chemotherapeutic agents. The most frequently prescribed CHP in this period was bei-mu, jia-wei-xiao-yao-san, jie-geng, chuan-xiong-cha-tiao-san, fu-ling, pu-gong-ying, huang-qin, mai-men-donɡ, yan-hu-suo and ji-xue-tenɡ. We conclude that the combined use of Chinese herbal medicine with Western medicine is common and there are potential herb-drug interactions. In addition to avoid such co-prescriptions, we recommend that future studies are warranted to determine if such instances would affect survival and/or quality of life of breast cancer patients.
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