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Health
Issue date: Sept. 25-27, 1998
New breast cancer therapies and resources
Also this week:
Jean Carper on tea vs. breast cancer
Dr. Bob Arnot on "The anti-breast cancer diet"
Several promising new therapies for breast cancer have
been announced in recent months. None is being touted as a cure, and some need more
testing to confirm their effectiveness. Yet taken together, experts say, they
represent a major step forward in the battle against breast cancer. Here are some
of the drugs receiving the most attention: Tamoxifen: Researchers are
hailing tamoxifen as the first drug known to prevent breast cancer. In April, federal
health officials announced that, in a four-year study of more than 13,000 women at
high risk of breast cancer, those who took tamoxifen had a 45 percent lower risk of
cancer than those who took a placebo. And earlier this month, a U.S. Food and Drug
Administration panel recommended that the drug be taken by healthy women whose family
history puts them at high risk of getting breast cancer. Tamoxifen's downside? It
raises the risk of uterine cancer, cataracts and blood clots. But those side effects
are rare. Xeloda: Also in April, the FDA gave accelerated approval to
xeloda, a drug used to treat advanced breast cancer tumors that don't respond to
chemotherapy. The FDA acted after a study showed the drug shrank tumors by more than
half in about one in five women who took it. Raloxifene: Just a month
after tamoxifen made news, researchers at the University of California-San Francisco
announced that its cousin, raloxifene, prevents breast cancer in post-menopausal
women. Their two-year clinical trial of more than 7,700 women found that those who
took raloxifene lowered their cancer risk by two-thirds. Ironically, federal
officials approved raloxifene only last December - for osteoporosis.Taxol: Doctors announced in May that adding taxol to the standard regimen of
chemotherapy drugs following breast cancer surgery increased survival rates by 26
percent. Taxol also reduced the risk of cancer recurrence by 22 percent. The results
came from a clinical trial involving more than 3,100 women and hundreds of medical
institutions.
For more information Cancer Information Service (National Cancer Institute)
1-800-4-CANCER (1-800-422-6237)
TTY: 1-800-332-8615 OncoLink - Breast Cancer
http://www.oncolink.upenn.edu/disease/breast Breast Cancer Network - American Cancer Society
http://www.cancer.org/ bcn/brmenu.htmlCancerNet (National Cancer Institute)
http://cancernet.nci.nih.gov Doctor's Guide to Breast Cancer Information & Resources
http://www.pslgroup.com/breastcancer.htm BreastCancerinfo.com
http://www.breastcancerinfo.com National Alliance of Breast
Cancer Organizations
http://www.breastcancerinfo.com Y-ME National Breast Cancer Organization
http://www.y-me.org National Action Plan on Breast Cancer
http://www.napbc.org National Breast Cancer Coalition
http://www.natlbcc.org
By Bruce Maxwell
(http://bmaxwell.home.mindspring.com), author of
How to Find Health Information onthe Internet and How to Access the Federal Government on the Internet
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