The chemotherapy and hormone treatments commonly given after surgery to women with breast cancer are much more effective in prolonging life than previously believed, a new study has found. The benefit of these treatments, in fact, increases year-to-year during the first decade after breast cancer is discovered and persists long after most women have stopped taking the drugs, according to research published in the Lancet, a British medical journal. Whereas recurrences of most types of cancer appear in the first five years after surgery, breast cancers can recur decades after an apparently "successful" treatment.