Professor Arnie Purushotham, Cancer Research UK’s senior clinical adviser, said: “The preliminary results of this small study suggest that a Mediterranean diet could lower the risk of breast cancer returning, but we’d need much longer follow-up than three years to confirm the diet’s impact”.
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Guidelines from the oncology society recommend women take tamoxifen for 10 years rather than five, because studies have shown this prevents cancer recurrence and improves survival.
“Aromatase inhibitors are now readily available around the world and therefore our results will further improve the outcome of women with breast cancer globally”.
After their cancer therapy is completed, the women will have regular advice from dieticians to help them reduce their calorie intake to 1,200-1,500 calories per day.
“The study will have an enormous impact; a reduction in recurrences is a very important finding”.
Dr Janine Lombard, from the ANZ Breast Cancer Trials Group which coordinated the Australian arm, says the study results are “tremendous news for women with breast cancer”.
Winer said it was most important to prevent recurrence outside the breast because that is what kills people. “We have shown that AIs given in a different way than is traditional will remarkably reduce fatal recurrences and recurrences in general and should therefore become the standard practice”.
He said: “In general, I would imagine that women who had riskier cancers will look to these data and think they are compelling for continuing on longer durations of treatment out to 10 or 15 years”. However, they added that the decision to take the drug still depends on the extent of the toxic effects of the drug on women’s quality of life.
Research published previous year 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.
Harold Burstein, an assistant professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School and a medical oncologist at Dana-Farber Medical Institute, acknowledged that “10 years of any therapy is a long time”.
Thousands of cancer patients could be spared chemotherapy every year following significant advances in personalised medicine, experts have said. It was also discovered that by the end of the study, 95% of women were still cancer-free if they would have continued taking extra medication, while the percentage for those not taking were 91%.
“Professor Roy Herbst, chief of medical oncology at the Yale Cancer Centre in the USA, said: “(Precision medicine) is about finding the right key for the lock, finding out what it is that is driving the tumour, what makes it tick”.
Those side effects can include “hot flashes, increased rate of uterine cancer, DVTs [clots in the deep veins of the leg that can break off and travel to the lung], increased rate of strokes, amongst other risks”, said Bernik, who is chief of surgical oncology at Lenox Hill Hospital, in New York City.
Women taking metformin before diagnosis were found to be more likely to die than people who did not take it, but those who began to take the drug after diagnosis were nearly 50 per cent more likely to survive, the study concluded.
The American Cancer Society estimates 246,660 new cases of invasive breast cancer will be diagnosed this year in the United States.
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A further study by the Oxford-based Early Breast Cancer Trialists Collaborative Group, also presented at ASCO, found that there was a real risk of cancer returning up to 20 years after hormone treatment was started.
