Promising Drug

Medicine

Help for breast cancer patients

Each year some 106,000 U.S. women learn that they have breast cancer. Thanks to improved public awareness, most of them make this discovery while the cancer is still confined to the breast. Following prompt treatment, usually a mastectomy, chances of survival are good: 85% of the women are alive five years later. But for too many women, the cancer is discovered after it has spread to the lymph nodes. By then the odds for survival are nowhere near as high. Even with chemotherapy the cancer often recurs.

Last week at an international meeting in Copenhagen, cancer specialists reported promising though very preliminary new data on a valuable weapon in their chemical arsenal. It is the drug tamoxifen, and it should be especially useful in treating those women whose cancer has spread beyond the breast. Said Dr. Charles Hubay of Cleveland's University Hospitals and Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine: "Chemotherapy and tamoxifen administered immediately following mastectomy were more effective than chemotherapy alone in delaying recurrence of cancer."

Doctors have been treating breast cancer patients with tamoxifen, a drug used in very advanced cases, at an earlier stage of the disease. The theory: many if not most breast cancers are linked with the hormone estrogen. Tamoxifen is an antiestrogen agent that has shown a no table ability to halt the growth of estrogen-connected tumors.

In the 33-month study, the doctors monitored 296 women up to age 76 who had undergone mastectomies. From tissue samples physicians found that three-quarters of the women had estrogen-linked tumors. These patients, as well as the others whose cancers were not connected with the hormone, were divided into three treatment groups: one was given a combination of drugs known as CMF; another CMF and tamoxifen; and the third CMF, tamoxifen and BCG (which is designed to bolster the immune system).

In the estrogen group, the relapse rate was 40% in those treated with CMF alone. But, remarkably, among women who had also been given tamoxifen, cancer reappeared in only about 10% of the cases.

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