CANCER STUDY SHOWS BENEFIT OF TAMOXIFEN

13 January 1992

A new retrospective study of breast cancer, incorporating a review of a number of smaller breast cancer studies across the world, has yielded results which may have important consequences for the future treatment and prevention of the disease. In particular, it looks like patients may benefit from expanded use of the estrogen antagonist tamoxifen.

The study, which was carried out by researchers at the Radcliffe Infirmary in Oxford, UK, and is published in The Lancet (January 4), looked at 133 trials involving 75,000 women with early (stage I or stage II) breast cancer. From the results of the analyses, it has become clear that adjuvant therapy can have a small, but profound effect on 10-year survival; the implication is that if enough women are offered this type of preventative therapy the overall effect could be an extra 100,000 10-year survivors per million women affected.

The Lancet study covers trials involving treatment by endocrine intervention such as tamoxifen and ovarian ablation, or polychemotherapy and immunotherapy. A total of 30,000 women were included in the hormonal arm, 3,000 took part in ovarian ablation trials, 11,000 in polychemotherapy trials, 15,000 in other chemotherapy comparisons, and 6,000 in immunotherapy trials.

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