Meanwhile, a study presented at ASCO has suggested chemotherapy is less effective in obese women with breast cancer.
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OBI Pharma Inc (台灣浩鼎), which has been embroiled in an insider trading scandal over the past few months, on Saturday delivered a presentation on the phase II and III clinical trials of OBI-822, its new breast cancer drug, at the annual meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) in Chicago.
But the majority of postmenopausal women now start on an aromatase inhibitor, not tamoxifen.
“The results of our study may present an alternative treatment for particular forms of endometrial hyperplasia, in contrast to standard progesterone-based therapies or hysterectomy”, said Emily Ko, MD, MSCR, an assistant professor of Obstetrics and Gynecology at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, and lead author of the study. In conjunction with surgery, radiation and multiple doses of this drug, Carter said all signs of the cancer were gone.
The Metastatic Breast Cancer Project (MBC Project) was created to collect health records, tumor specimens, and saliva samples in an effort to understand, at a genomic level, how tumors metastasize and why some patients react differently to treatment than others.
Almost 2,000 patients were looked into and those who took the affordable medication for five extra years saw the protective effects boost, with women 34 per cent less likely to have a recurrence and a fifth less at risk of fatality. But, added Burstein, who wasn’t involved in the study, most of the women tolerated the extended treatment reasonably well. The study received scientific advisement from UPMC and assistance with statistical analysis from epidemiologists at the University of Pittsburgh Graduate School of Public Health.
Research published a year ago in the journal JAMA Internal Medicine also found that eating a Mediterranean diet supplemented with extra virgin olive oil was associated with a lower risk of breast cancer.
The National Cancer Institute (NCI) estimates that approximately 39.6 percent of men and women will be diagnosed with cancer of any site at some point during their lifetime.
Women who had aromatase inhibitors (AIs) for 10 years, rather than five, were a third less likely to have their cancer return or develop cancer in the other breast, it found.
The researchers studied 210,509 lung cancer patients over age 65 and applied two different algorithms to measure the presence of an autoimmune disease. The results “suggest that longer durations of widely available therapy reduce the risk of cancer recurrence and prevent second cancers from arising”. In the new study, however, they found that being on hormone therapy for 10 years yields better results.
Analysing the data, Harold Burstein, associate professor at the Dana Farber Cancer Institute at Harvard University and a spokesman for Asco, said women with higher risk breast cancer – equating to about 20,000 women in the United Kingdom – would benefit the most from the switch. This treatment engineers a patient’s own immune cells to recognize and attack their own tumors.
The rate of severe side effects was slightly lower among women who received the combo therapy, about 16 percent compared to 23 percent.
Adopting the diet of fresh fish, vegetables, whole grains, legumes and olive oil could dramatically reduce the chances of cancer coming back, they said.
Scientists used two separate algorithms of more than 210,000 lung cancer patients who were older than 65 years old.
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“Baroness Delyth Morgan, the chief executive at the charity Breast Cancer Now, said: “This is a really important study that could one day have a major impact on how we use anti-hormone breast cancer treatments”.
