Call to hand out 6p breast cancer pills ‘like statins’

DOCTORS should give women pills to prevent breast cancer as freely as statins, researchers say.

Tamoxifen, which costs just 6p a day, reduces the risk of the illness by more than a third, a major study has found.

Furthermore, the preventative effect lasted for 20 years after a woman stopped taking the pill and was expected still to be working 30 years later or more.

British researchers said if GPs routinely prescribed tamoxifen to the half a million women at high risk of breast cancer, as many as 3,000 cases a year would be prevented.

The pills are available on the NHS but fewer than 1,000 women are taking them to prevent breast cancer, partly because family doctors are unaware of the benefits.

Last year the Scottish Government launched a five-year scheme to give women genetically at risk of breast cancer access to the drug. Around 4,600 women a year in Scotland are diagnosed with the disease.

Around one in eight women will develop breast cancer in Britain. Women are deemed to be high risk if their likelihood of getting the illness is greater than 17 per cent – most often due to a family history of the disease.

A study of 7,154 high-risk women found those given tamoxifen daily for a five-year

‘There’s a fatalism about the disease’

period in the 1990s were 38 per cent less likely to have developed breast cancer.

Researchers checking up on the women found that even though some stopped taking the drugs 20 years ago, they were still protected. And the team expects the effect will still be working in 30 years.

Lead researcher Jack Cuzick, a professor at Queen Mary, the University of London, said that the drugs should be as widely prescribed as statins are to protect against heart disease.

‘There’s a major cultural shift which the profession needs to embrace,’ he said.

‘There’s a fatalism about cancer, there’s a feeling there’s nothing you can do about it very much. We have very clear evidence we can do something.

‘What’s new and exciting about this is that even though tamoxifen was stopped after five years, benefits continued unabated after 20 years.’

He said many women were unaware they were at high risk. To address this, he said, they should take risk assessments – a short questionnaire – at the time of their first mammogram, aged 47 to 50.

Professor Cuzick presented his study at the San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium conference in Texas and it is also published in the Lancet Oncology medical journal.