Estrogen can prevent breast cancer recurrence
Estrogen can prevent breast cancer recurrence
Very low dose of estrogen might help women who has breast cancer recurrence after treatment. Even if the treatment is intended to prevent estrogen from being tumors, the researchers say, after years of therapy, the body may need to eliminate all of the hormones.
Their findings, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, said this way will help some advanced breast cancer patients.
Dr. Matthew Eliis of “Washington University School of Medicine” at St. Louis and colleagues studied 66 women whose advanced breast cancer who had undergone treatment with newer drugs called “aromatase inhibitors”. All medications include Aromasin, Pfizer, Femara from Novartis and AstraZeneca Plc’s Arimidex.
“All the women in the study had experienced breast cancer, after undergoing treatment for some time their disease relapse. Currently taking estrogen-lowering drugs, and they increased disease develops,” Ellis said in a statement.
“So, they did chemotherapy. We found that estrogen treatment stopped disease progression in many patients and was much better tolerated than chemotherapy” he said.
“They gave the women a form of estrogen called estradiol, in doses of very high and very low. Both doses helped 30% of the women” as said by Ellis and colleagues.
“We demonstrated clearly that the low dose was better tolerated than the high dose and was as effective for controlling metastatic disease,” said Ellis.
The treatment was not always permanent. At 30% of women are helped by the estrogen, the tumors began to grow again. However, re-use of aromatase inhibitors, a pill taken daily and have levels of toxins much lower than a third chemotherapy can helped women.
More than 400 thousand women die from breast cancer worldwide each year. As many as 75% of breast cancers are estrogen-receptor-positive, which means they are fed by estrogen, and treatment with drugs such as tamoxifen and aromatase inhibitors can cut the supply of hormones.
