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New study firmly ties hormone use to breast cancer, plus BONUS study and complete cure
New study firmly ties hormone use to breast cancer
By MARILYNN MARCHIONE, AP Medical Writer
SAN ANTONIO – Taking menopause hormones for five years doubles the risk for breast cancer, according to a new analysis of a big federal study that reveals the most dramatic evidence yet of the dangers of these still-popular pills.
http://cosmos.bcst.yahoo.com/up/ylocalnews;_ylt=ApnGWjre.aECao2N_3k...
new medical test perdicts breast cancer
Even women who took estrogen and progestin pills for as little as a couple of years
had a greater chance of getting cancer. And when they stopped taking them, their odds quickly improved, returning to a normal risk level roughly two years after quitting.
These findings were made using the artificial hormones, not the natural substances. Natural progesterone actually is protective against breast cancer and other cancers, however, there is no completely safe form of estrogen, not even the natural form.
Collectively, these new findings are likely to end any doubt that the risks outweigh the benefits for most women.
It is clear that breast cancer rates plunged in recent years mainly because millions of women quit hormone therapy and fewer newly menopausal women started on it, said the study's leader, Dr. Rowan Chlebowski of Harbor-UCLA Medical Center in Los Angeles.
"It's an excellent message for women: You can still diminish risk (by quitting), even if you've been on hormones for a long time," said Dr. Claudine Isaacs of Georgetown University's Lombardi Comprehensive Cancer Center. "It's not like smoking where you have to wait 10 or 15 years for the risk to come down."
Study results were given Saturday at the San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium.
They are from the Women's Health Initiative, which tested estrogen and progestin pills that doctors long believed would prevent heart disease, bone loss and many other problems in women after menopause. The main part of the study was stopped in 2002 when researchers saw surprisingly higher risks of heart problems and breast cancer in hormone users.
Since then, experts have debated whether these risks apply to women who start on hormones when they enter menopause, usually in their 50s, and take them for shorter periods of time. Most of the women in the federal study were in their 60s and well past menopause.
So the advice has been to use hormones only if symptoms like hot flashes are severe, and at the lowest dose and shortest time possible. The new study sharpens that message, Chlebowski said.
"It does change the balance" on whether to start on treatment at all, he said.
Even so, most women will not get breast cancer by taking the pills short-term. The increased cancer risk from a couple of years of hormone use translates to a few extra cases of breast cancer a year for every 1,000 women on hormones. This risk accumulates with each year of use, though.
The Women's Health Initiative study had two parts. In one, 16,608 women closely matched for age, weight and other health factors were randomly assigned to take either Wyeth Pharmaceuticals' Prempro — estrogen and progestin — or dummy pills.
This part was halted when researchers saw a 26 percent higher risk of breast cancer in those on Prempro.
But that was an average over the 5 1/2 years women were on the pills. For the new study, researchers tracked 15,387 of these women through July 2005, and plotted breast cancer cases as they occurred over time.
They saw a clear trend: Risk rose with the start of use, peaked when the study ended and fell as nearly all hormone users stopped taking their pills. At the peak, the breast cancer risk for pill takers was twice that of the others.
Think of it as President Bush's public approval rating, said another study leader, Dr. Peter Ravdin of the University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston.
"Bush's popularity may be 50 percent on average, but it might have been descending the whole time he was president," Ravdin said.
In the second part of the federal study, researchers observed just 16,121 women who had already been on hormones for an average of seven years and another group of 25,328 women who had never used them. No results on breast cancer risk in these women have been given until now.
Plotting cases over time, researchers saw in retrospect that hormone users had started out with twice the risk of breast cancer as the others, and it fell as use declined. Among those taking hormones at the start of the study, use dropped to 41 percent in 2003, the year after the main results made news.
In the general population, use of hormone products has dropped 70 percent since the study, said another of its leaders, Dr. JoAnn Manson, preventive medicine chief at Harvard's Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston.
That corresponds with big drops in breast cancer cases, but some scientists have said this could be due to a fall-off in mammograms, which would mean fewer cancers were being detected, not necessarily that fewer were occurring.
The new study puts that theory to rest. Mammography rates were virtually the same among those taking hormones and those not.
"It is clear that changing mammography patterns cannot explain the dramatic reductions in breast cancer risk," Manson said.
"The data are getting stronger," said Dr. C. Kent Osborne, a breast cancer specialist at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston.
Women who do need the pills should not panic, though the doubling of risk — a 100 percent increase — for long-term users is quite worrisome, cancer specialists say.
Although the new study does not calculate risks in terms of actual cases, previous research showed that the average increased risk of 26 percent meant a difference of a few extra cases a year for every 1,000 women on hormone pills, compared with nonusers.
"Hormone therapy remains a good health care choice to relieve moderate to severe menopausal symptoms," says a statement from Wyeth, which made the pills used in the study.
"Most women should be able to discontinue hormones in three to four years," or at least reduce their dose, Manson said.
A future analysis will look at other women in the study who took only estrogen, generally women who have had hysterectomies.
____
On the Net:
Cancer conference: http://www.sabcs.org
Hormone study: http://www.nhlbi.nih.gov/whi/estro_pro.htm
BONUS
Osteoporosis Drug Seems to Shrink Breast Tumors
By Amanda Gardner
HealthDay Reporter
http://cosmos.bcst.yahoo.com/up/ylocalnews;_ylt=AsloV4oGe9k8JwkrBjc...
osteoporosis drug may help fight cancer
THURSDAY, Dec. 11 (HealthDay News) -- Researchers continue to test the mettle of breakthrough breast cancer drugs, three decades after tamoxifen changed the medical landscape by drastically reducing the risk of recurrences in women with estrogen receptor-positive tumors.
Encouraging findings on several different drugs were presented Thursday at the CTRC-AACR San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium in Texas.
While researchers are still looking into these findings, some remarkable findings were made studying other drug trials, and some quite by accident: In the case of Nasal Crom, at the end of that study, the women who came into the study with breast cancer, became completely free of it by the trials end, because of the antiangeogenisis
factor, which kept blood vessels from feeding the tumors. CoQ10 and CLA were just as effective at killing the tumors, but had different pathways of doing the job.
First in the line-up, the osteoporosis drug zoledronic acid (Zometa) appears to shrink breast tumors in patients who undergo chemotherapy.
The drug is already approved to treat breast cancer that has spread to the bone and, earlier this year, was reported to lower the risk of breast cancer recurrence in pre-menopausal women with early estrogen- or progesterone-positive tumors.
In an analysis of slightly more than 200 women, those who received Zometa in addition to chemotherapy had better results than those receiving chemotherapy alone. After compensating for variables such as estrogen receptor status and treatment duration, residual invasive tumor size was 42.4 millimeters in the chemotherapy alone group, and 28.2 millimeters in the combination group.
"This data suggests that zoledronic acid is doing something more than protecting bone," said study senior author Dr. Robert Coleman, a professor of medical oncology at the University of Sheffield in England. "It's not practice-changing. It's hypothesis-generating, which will lead to the design of new trials to look at this in detail. But this is the first patient-related evidence."
Coleman spoke, along with researchers involved with other trials, at a Thursday teleconference. Other studies showing promise included:
Postmenopausal women with estrogen receptor- and/or progesterone receptor-positive breast cancer who took the aromatase inhibitor exemestane (Aromasin) had a 15 percent relative reduction in recurrences and a 19 percent reduction in the risk of distant metastasis, compared with those taking tamoxifen alone. "Exemestane is very effective at preventing recurrences," said Dr. Stephen Jones, medical director of U.S. Oncology Research in Houston. Exemestane, like other aromatase inhibitors, blocks production of estrogen, while tamoxifen, long the gold standard in breast cancer therapy, inhibits the hormone's effects in the body.
Seventy percent of women receiving Herceptin (trastuzumab), a drug used to treat HER2-positive breast cancer, plus chemotherapy before surgery survived three years without a recurrence. Only slightly more than half of women receiving chemotherapy alone survived that long. The incidence of major heart problems was low. "Herceptin given before surgery with chemotherapy significantly [reduces the likelihood] of a recurrence in patients with advanced HER2-positive cancer, and most likely will translate into a benefit in terms of survival," said Dr. Luca Gianni, director of medical oncology at the National Cancer Institute in Milan, Italy. "We think that this data establishes preoperative Herceptin with chemotherapy as a standard treatment option for women with advanced HER2-positive breast cancer."
Combining lapatinib (Tykerb), another HER2 inhibitor, with an aromatase inhibitor (in this case, letrozole) prolonged progression-free survival from three months among those taking letrozole (Femara) alone to 8.2 months in women taking both drugs.
These patients had HER-2-positive metastatic breast cancer. "The combination shows benefits in controlling the disease and controlling it for longer than using endocrine therapy alone," said Stephen Johnston, a consultant in medical oncology and reader in breast cancer medicine at Royal Marsden Hospital and Foundation in the United
Kingdom. "The suggestion is that combined therapy may be the best approach."
Finally, aromatase inhibitors may be poised to replace tamoxifen as standard treatment to prevent breast cancer recurrence in women who have already undergone conventional therapy, according to a new meta-analysis. The analysis looked at two groups: women with postmenopausal estrogen receptor-positive breast cancer who took tamoxifen for five years after standard treatment and women who took tamoxifen but then switched to an aromatase inhibitor after initial treatment. "The data are still early but it does show a statistically significant advantage in [women who were switched from tamoxifen to an aromatase inhibitor] but not in [women who took tamoxifen for the full five years]," said Dr. James Ingle, director of the breast cancer program at the Mayo Clinic, in Rochester, Minn. "But you have to remember our experience with tamoxifen. It took 10 to 15 years to see the full effect of tamoxifen."
More information
Visit the U.S. National Cancer Institute for more on breast cancer treatment. Standardized breast cancer treatments have been found to do more harm than good, and removal of the breast was not found to be anymore effective as a lumpectomy, which was also found to be not effective.
The tumor sends out as many as one million cancer seeds per day into the the blood stream to be implanted in various parts of the body. When the main tumor is removed, a chemical signal is produced and sent out to these other seeds to start growing. As long as the primary tumor was in tact, the chemical growth signal was not turned on to mastecise.
A doctor in San Antoino, has made it a practice to leave cancer tumors in place and use radio waves to actually cook the tumors to death. On normally fatal liver cancer, the patient is released from the hospital the same day of the treatment which can be done in a noninvasive manner, and the patient leaves cancer free, and no new tumors will form in the future, because the primary tumor has not been removed, but is still dead, and will not regrow.
Every cancer that forms in a human body can be treated in this manner, including brain tumors, and it is very cost effective. That aspect of the treatment, of being cost effective, is what makes the treatment unpopular with the medical and drug industry.
The patients need not to receive chemo or any form of followup, and there are no side effects other than becoming permanently cancer free.
Do not look for this treatment to be offered freely by any doctor. If you wish to have this treatment, you do have to ask for it, and it is usually met with resistance because of it's cost effectiveness and permanent effect. The proper name for the treatment is called "tumor radio wave obliteration", which is not expensive, and which will keep the cancer seeds from growing in the body. If the primary tumor is left intact, a chemical signal to repress growth will be constantly sent out even though the primary tumor is dead.
By MARILYNN MARCHIONE, AP Medical Writer
SAN ANTONIO – Taking menopause hormones for five years doubles the risk for breast cancer, according to a new analysis of a big federal study that reveals the most dramatic evidence yet of the dangers of these still-popular pills.
http://cosmos.bcst.yahoo.com/up/ylocalnews;_ylt=ApnGWjre.aECao2N_3k...
new medical test perdicts breast cancer
Even women who took estrogen and progestin pills for as little as a couple of years
had a greater chance of getting cancer. And when they stopped taking them, their odds quickly improved, returning to a normal risk level roughly two years after quitting.
These findings were made using the artificial hormones, not the natural substances. Natural progesterone actually is protective against breast cancer and other cancers, however, there is no completely safe form of estrogen, not even the natural form.
Collectively, these new findings are likely to end any doubt that the risks outweigh the benefits for most women.
It is clear that breast cancer rates plunged in recent years mainly because millions of women quit hormone therapy and fewer newly menopausal women started on it, said the study's leader, Dr. Rowan Chlebowski of Harbor-UCLA Medical Center in Los Angeles.
"It's an excellent message for women: You can still diminish risk (by quitting), even if you've been on hormones for a long time," said Dr. Claudine Isaacs of Georgetown University's Lombardi Comprehensive Cancer Center. "It's not like smoking where you have to wait 10 or 15 years for the risk to come down."
Study results were given Saturday at the San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium.
They are from the Women's Health Initiative, which tested estrogen and progestin pills that doctors long believed would prevent heart disease, bone loss and many other problems in women after menopause. The main part of the study was stopped in 2002 when researchers saw surprisingly higher risks of heart problems and breast cancer in hormone users.
Since then, experts have debated whether these risks apply to women who start on hormones when they enter menopause, usually in their 50s, and take them for shorter periods of time. Most of the women in the federal study were in their 60s and well past menopause.
So the advice has been to use hormones only if symptoms like hot flashes are severe, and at the lowest dose and shortest time possible. The new study sharpens that message, Chlebowski said.
"It does change the balance" on whether to start on treatment at all, he said.
Even so, most women will not get breast cancer by taking the pills short-term. The increased cancer risk from a couple of years of hormone use translates to a few extra cases of breast cancer a year for every 1,000 women on hormones. This risk accumulates with each year of use, though.
The Women's Health Initiative study had two parts. In one, 16,608 women closely matched for age, weight and other health factors were randomly assigned to take either Wyeth Pharmaceuticals' Prempro — estrogen and progestin — or dummy pills.
This part was halted when researchers saw a 26 percent higher risk of breast cancer in those on Prempro.
But that was an average over the 5 1/2 years women were on the pills. For the new study, researchers tracked 15,387 of these women through July 2005, and plotted breast cancer cases as they occurred over time.
They saw a clear trend: Risk rose with the start of use, peaked when the study ended and fell as nearly all hormone users stopped taking their pills. At the peak, the breast cancer risk for pill takers was twice that of the others.
Think of it as President Bush's public approval rating, said another study leader, Dr. Peter Ravdin of the University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston.
"Bush's popularity may be 50 percent on average, but it might have been descending the whole time he was president," Ravdin said.
In the second part of the federal study, researchers observed just 16,121 women who had already been on hormones for an average of seven years and another group of 25,328 women who had never used them. No results on breast cancer risk in these women have been given until now.
Plotting cases over time, researchers saw in retrospect that hormone users had started out with twice the risk of breast cancer as the others, and it fell as use declined. Among those taking hormones at the start of the study, use dropped to 41 percent in 2003, the year after the main results made news.
In the general population, use of hormone products has dropped 70 percent since the study, said another of its leaders, Dr. JoAnn Manson, preventive medicine chief at Harvard's Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston.
That corresponds with big drops in breast cancer cases, but some scientists have said this could be due to a fall-off in mammograms, which would mean fewer cancers were being detected, not necessarily that fewer were occurring.
The new study puts that theory to rest. Mammography rates were virtually the same among those taking hormones and those not.
"It is clear that changing mammography patterns cannot explain the dramatic reductions in breast cancer risk," Manson said.
"The data are getting stronger," said Dr. C. Kent Osborne, a breast cancer specialist at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston.
Women who do need the pills should not panic, though the doubling of risk — a 100 percent increase — for long-term users is quite worrisome, cancer specialists say.
Although the new study does not calculate risks in terms of actual cases, previous research showed that the average increased risk of 26 percent meant a difference of a few extra cases a year for every 1,000 women on hormone pills, compared with nonusers.
"Hormone therapy remains a good health care choice to relieve moderate to severe menopausal symptoms," says a statement from Wyeth, which made the pills used in the study.
"Most women should be able to discontinue hormones in three to four years," or at least reduce their dose, Manson said.
A future analysis will look at other women in the study who took only estrogen, generally women who have had hysterectomies.
____
On the Net:
Cancer conference: http://www.sabcs.org
Hormone study: http://www.nhlbi.nih.gov/whi/estro_pro.htm
BONUS
Osteoporosis Drug Seems to Shrink Breast Tumors
By Amanda Gardner
HealthDay Reporter
http://cosmos.bcst.yahoo.com/up/ylocalnews;_ylt=AsloV4oGe9k8JwkrBjc...
osteoporosis drug may help fight cancer
THURSDAY, Dec. 11 (HealthDay News) -- Researchers continue to test the mettle of breakthrough breast cancer drugs, three decades after tamoxifen changed the medical landscape by drastically reducing the risk of recurrences in women with estrogen receptor-positive tumors.
Encouraging findings on several different drugs were presented Thursday at the CTRC-AACR San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium in Texas.
While researchers are still looking into these findings, some remarkable findings were made studying other drug trials, and some quite by accident: In the case of Nasal Crom, at the end of that study, the women who came into the study with breast cancer, became completely free of it by the trials end, because of the antiangeogenisis
factor, which kept blood vessels from feeding the tumors. CoQ10 and CLA were just as effective at killing the tumors, but had different pathways of doing the job.
First in the line-up, the osteoporosis drug zoledronic acid (Zometa) appears to shrink breast tumors in patients who undergo chemotherapy.
The drug is already approved to treat breast cancer that has spread to the bone and, earlier this year, was reported to lower the risk of breast cancer recurrence in pre-menopausal women with early estrogen- or progesterone-positive tumors.
In an analysis of slightly more than 200 women, those who received Zometa in addition to chemotherapy had better results than those receiving chemotherapy alone. After compensating for variables such as estrogen receptor status and treatment duration, residual invasive tumor size was 42.4 millimeters in the chemotherapy alone group, and 28.2 millimeters in the combination group.
"This data suggests that zoledronic acid is doing something more than protecting bone," said study senior author Dr. Robert Coleman, a professor of medical oncology at the University of Sheffield in England. "It's not practice-changing. It's hypothesis-generating, which will lead to the design of new trials to look at this in detail. But this is the first patient-related evidence."
Coleman spoke, along with researchers involved with other trials, at a Thursday teleconference. Other studies showing promise included:
Postmenopausal women with estrogen receptor- and/or progesterone receptor-positive breast cancer who took the aromatase inhibitor exemestane (Aromasin) had a 15 percent relative reduction in recurrences and a 19 percent reduction in the risk of distant metastasis, compared with those taking tamoxifen alone. "Exemestane is very effective at preventing recurrences," said Dr. Stephen Jones, medical director of U.S. Oncology Research in Houston. Exemestane, like other aromatase inhibitors, blocks production of estrogen, while tamoxifen, long the gold standard in breast cancer therapy, inhibits the hormone's effects in the body.
Seventy percent of women receiving Herceptin (trastuzumab), a drug used to treat HER2-positive breast cancer, plus chemotherapy before surgery survived three years without a recurrence. Only slightly more than half of women receiving chemotherapy alone survived that long. The incidence of major heart problems was low. "Herceptin given before surgery with chemotherapy significantly [reduces the likelihood] of a recurrence in patients with advanced HER2-positive cancer, and most likely will translate into a benefit in terms of survival," said Dr. Luca Gianni, director of medical oncology at the National Cancer Institute in Milan, Italy. "We think that this data establishes preoperative Herceptin with chemotherapy as a standard treatment option for women with advanced HER2-positive breast cancer."
Combining lapatinib (Tykerb), another HER2 inhibitor, with an aromatase inhibitor (in this case, letrozole) prolonged progression-free survival from three months among those taking letrozole (Femara) alone to 8.2 months in women taking both drugs.
These patients had HER-2-positive metastatic breast cancer. "The combination shows benefits in controlling the disease and controlling it for longer than using endocrine therapy alone," said Stephen Johnston, a consultant in medical oncology and reader in breast cancer medicine at Royal Marsden Hospital and Foundation in the United
Kingdom. "The suggestion is that combined therapy may be the best approach."
Finally, aromatase inhibitors may be poised to replace tamoxifen as standard treatment to prevent breast cancer recurrence in women who have already undergone conventional therapy, according to a new meta-analysis. The analysis looked at two groups: women with postmenopausal estrogen receptor-positive breast cancer who took tamoxifen for five years after standard treatment and women who took tamoxifen but then switched to an aromatase inhibitor after initial treatment. "The data are still early but it does show a statistically significant advantage in [women who were switched from tamoxifen to an aromatase inhibitor] but not in [women who took tamoxifen for the full five years]," said Dr. James Ingle, director of the breast cancer program at the Mayo Clinic, in Rochester, Minn. "But you have to remember our experience with tamoxifen. It took 10 to 15 years to see the full effect of tamoxifen."
More information
Visit the U.S. National Cancer Institute for more on breast cancer treatment. Standardized breast cancer treatments have been found to do more harm than good, and removal of the breast was not found to be anymore effective as a lumpectomy, which was also found to be not effective.
The tumor sends out as many as one million cancer seeds per day into the the blood stream to be implanted in various parts of the body. When the main tumor is removed, a chemical signal is produced and sent out to these other seeds to start growing. As long as the primary tumor was in tact, the chemical growth signal was not turned on to mastecise.
A doctor in San Antoino, has made it a practice to leave cancer tumors in place and use radio waves to actually cook the tumors to death. On normally fatal liver cancer, the patient is released from the hospital the same day of the treatment which can be done in a noninvasive manner, and the patient leaves cancer free, and no new tumors will form in the future, because the primary tumor has not been removed, but is still dead, and will not regrow.
Every cancer that forms in a human body can be treated in this manner, including brain tumors, and it is very cost effective. That aspect of the treatment, of being cost effective, is what makes the treatment unpopular with the medical and drug industry.
The patients need not to receive chemo or any form of followup, and there are no side effects other than becoming permanently cancer free.
Do not look for this treatment to be offered freely by any doctor. If you wish to have this treatment, you do have to ask for it, and it is usually met with resistance because of it's cost effectiveness and permanent effect. The proper name for the treatment is called "tumor radio wave obliteration", which is not expensive, and which will keep the cancer seeds from growing in the body. If the primary tumor is left intact, a chemical signal to repress growth will be constantly sent out even though the primary tumor is dead.
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Permalink Reply by Rivkah Cohen on
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Thank you for sharing the result of hormones and cancer as well as the cure. Thank you for investing your time to share the help so many need!
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