It paid off: 95% of patients who enrolled provided detailed info on their cancer, treatments and experiences; more than 1,000 gave researchers access to copies of their medical records and allowed them to conduct next-gen sequencing on their tumor samples; and more than 400 sent saliva samples collected at home in to the Broad.
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Currently, women who have had surgery to remove breast cancer are prescribed drugs known as aromatase inhibitors for five years to prevent tumours coming back.
Dr Paul Goss, a professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School said: ‘It will help tens of thousands of women.
There is already evidence that a Mediterranean diet can help reduce chances of developing cancer in the first place, as well as protect against heart disease.
“The study will have an enormous impact; a reduction in recurrences is a very important finding”.
Meanwhile, a study presented at ASCO has suggested chemotherapy is less effective in obese women with breast cancer.
‘This will markedly reduce fatal recurrences and recurrences in general in breast cancer patients’.
Use of metformin-commonly used as the front-line treatment for type 2 diabetes-improves survival for some breast cancer patients and shows promise as a treatment for patients diagnosed with endometrial hyperplasia, according to the results of two new studies presented by researchers from the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania at the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) Annual Meeting.
The study involved 1,918 postmenopausal women in Canada and the United States who had received five years of any one of three aromatase inhibitor therapies either as initial treatment or after taking tamoxifen, another anti-estrogen drug dating back to the 1970s. They said it was far from clear that the benefit of 10 years of an aromatase inhibitor outweighed the risk of side effects like bone loss and joint and muscle pain.
But some experts noted that the women who took the drug an extra five years did not live longer on the whole than those in the control group.
The results of the study were published online in the New England Journal of Medicine, which also featured an editorial calling the study “reassuring” and saying that “the findings have direct application for clinical practice”.
The 10-year course of therapy was not associated with any decrease in quality of life.
But a study involving nearly 2,000 patients found that taking them for an extra five years massively increased the protective effects.
For every 100 women in the study who do not lose weight, they expect to see 23 have a recurrence of the tumour.
But she said: ” We’re really concerned about this getting through the Nice appraisal system because what we’ve seen over the last seven years is that new breast cancer drugs are just not getting through the process”.
“Using metformin as a cancer prevention strategy has been controversial and results have been inconsistent, but our analysis reveals that use of the drug is time-dependent, which may explain the disparity”, says lead author Dr. Yun Rose Li.
Other researchers said doctors should have crucial discussions with women to weigh up the potentially life-saving benefits of taking the drugs against the side effects. With other people, entering remission does not mean the risk of cancer ever returning has gone.
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Millions of women should take 10p a day drugs for a decade to slash their risk of breast cancer returning, researchers claim.
