ORLANDO, Fla. (Ivanhoe Newswire) -- A drug approved for osteoporosis
prevention and treatment may also prevent breast and other types of cancer.
A study at the University of California at San Diego found post-menopausal women
who took the drug raloxifene (Evista) were 55 percent less likely to develop
invasive, estrogen-receptor (ER) positive breast cancer compared with women who
did not take the drug. The drug reduced this risk for at least 8 years
regardless of age, prior hormone use or baseline breast cancer risk.
“This is great because a lot of women have bone issues, and may be at a high
risk for getting an invasive breast cancer,” Dr. Black said. “This medicine is a
safe medicine that can prevent breast cancer.”
Raloxifene is a selective estrogen receptor modulator (SERM), which means it has
estrogen-like effects on tissues like bone, but anti-estrogen effects on tissues
like breast tissue. Most post-menopausal women with breast cancer have invasive,
ER positive breast cancer. When breast cancer is invasive, it has started to
break through normal breast tissue barriers and invade surrounding areas. ER
positive, or hormone responsive, means the breast cancer grows when it comes in
contact with estrogen.
“We now have medicines, such as Evista, that can sit on that estrogen receptor
and block that receptor so that estrogen cannot get on [it],” Dalliah Mashon
Black, M.D., a breast surgeon at the Hoffberger Breast Center at Mercy Medical
Center in Baltimore, who is not associated with the study, told Ivanhoe. “That,
in turn, kills the cancer cells.”
The study was conducted as a follow-up to the Raloxifene Use for the Heart Trial
(RUTH), the world’s largest study of women and heart disease to date. The trial
found raloxifene did not protect against heart disease, but did reduce the risk
of invasive breast cancer by 44 percent.
According to the National Cancer Institute, 182,460 new cases of breast cancer
in women will be diagnosed in 2008.
SOURCE: Journal of the National Cancer Institute, 2008; published online June
10th
