Using drug longer helps cancer patients: study
Tamoxifen use likely to change, especially for younger women
Taking the drug tamoxifen for 10 years instead of five, as doctors recommend now, may improve breast cancer patients’ chances of preventing the disease from returning or killing them, a major study finds.
The results could change treatment, especially for younger women. The findings are a surprise because earlier research suggested that taking the hormone-blocking drug for longer than five years didn’t help and might even be harmful.
In the new study, researchers found that women who took tamoxifen for 10 years lowered their risk of a recurrence by 25 per cent and of dying of breast cancer by 29 per cent compared to those who took the pills for just five years.
In absolute terms, continuing on tamoxifen kept three additional women out of every 100 from dying of breast cancer within five to 14 years from when their disease was diagnosed. When added to the benefit from the first five years of use, a decade of tamoxifen can cut breast cancer mortality in half during the second decade after diagnosis, researchers estimate.
Some women balk at taking a preventive drug for so long, but for those at high risk of a recurrence, “this will be a convincer that they should continue,” said Dr. Peter Ravdin, director of the breast cancer program at the UT Health Science Center in San Antonio, Texas.
He reviewed results of the study, which was being presented Wednesday at a breast cancer conference in San Antonio and published by the British medical journal Lancet.
“The result of this trial will have a major, immediate impact on premenopausal women,” Ravdin said.
About 50,000 of the roughly 230,000 new cases of breast cancer in the United States each year occur in women before menopause. Most breast cancers are fuelled by estrogen, and hormone blockers are known to cut the risk of recurrence in such cases.
Tamoxifen long was the top choice, but newer drugs called aromatase inhibitors — sold as Arimidex, Femara, Aromasin and in generic form — do the job with less risk of causing uterine cancer and other problems.
But the newer drugs don’t work well before menopause. Even some women past menopause choose tamoxifen over the newer drugs, which cost more and have different side effects such as joint pain, bone loss and sexual problems.
Tamoxifen had some troubling side effects: Longer use nearly doubled the risk of endometrial cancer. But it rarely proved fatal, and there was no increased risk among premenopausal women in the study — the very group tamoxifen helps most.
“Overall the benefits of extended tamoxifen seemed to outweigh the risks substantially,” Dr. Trevor Powles of the Cancer Centre London wrote in an editorial published with the study.
The study was sponsored by cancer research organizations in Britain and Europe, the United States Army, and AstraZeneca PLC, which makes Nolvadex, a brand of tamoxifen, which also is sold as a generic for 10 to 50 cents US a day.