TESTS BACK BREAST-CANCER DRUG THERAPY

                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: FRIDAY, January 3, 1992                   TAG: 9201030115
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL                    PAGE: A-1   EDITION: METRO  
SOURCE: The New York Times
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium
TESTS BACK BREAST-CANCER DRUG THERAPY
In findings that have startled even the most optimistic experts, the largest analysis of breast cancer patients ever conducted shows that the life-saving benefits of widely used hormone or drug treatments prevail for at least 10 years, long after therapy has ended.
The difference in breast cancer recurrence and death rates actually continued to increase several years after even relatively brief treatment had ended, the analysis showed. Benefits of the synthetic hormone tamoxifen or a combination of drugs in chemotherapy were even more striking in the second five-year period than in the first.
In recent years, experts have begun recommending such treatment. But it can have side effects, and doctors have not always prescribed it for patients in whom cancer is caught early and who seem to be free of cancer after surgery.
Experts said this practice would be challenged by the new findings, which are the most thorough and statistically advanced analysis yet of early breast cancer treatment.
The analysis showed that fewer women treated with tamoxifen or with chemotherapy had recurrences and more lived longer than women who did not receive such treatment.
Although the results were less striking in women with the earliest forms of breast cancer, they still were significant, particularly several years after treatment.
Tamoxifen blocks the action of the female hormone estrogen in the body. Tamoxifen, but not chemotherapy, also protected against development of new cancer in the opposite breast, the analysis showed.
The findings suggested that tamoxifen in women under 50 years old produces as good an effect as chemotherapy, which is more arduous and toxic, and might be an alternative for some women. ICI Pharma, a subsidiary of ICI Americas Inc. of Wilmington, Del., sells tamoxifen under the trade name of Nolvadex.
In women before menopause, treatment with surgery, radiation or drugs to destroy the action of the ovaries and to induce menopause also appeared to have strong benefits.
The treatment, ovarian ablation, has largely been abandoned in the United States and other countries in recent years. About 80 percent of breast cancers develop in women 50 and older.
The study was a statistical analysis of 133 scientifically controlled trials of all kinds of follow-up treatment of 75,000 women with breast cancer confined to the breast or nearby lymph nodes.
Breast cancer researchers from around the world provided the team with the data it needed for its analysis.
The study is being reported Saturday in the Lancet, a British medical journal. The findings were announced at a news conference Thursday in London.

by Archana Subramaniam by CNB