The average 30-year-old woman has an 11 percent chance of developing breast cancer by the time she is 80, according to the a new study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association.
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Postmenopausal women who took the drug letrozole for a decade instead of an often prescribed five-year period saw a 34 per cent lower risk of recurrence or of a new cancer in the other breast than those who received a placebo, according to researchers.
Professor Roy Herbst, chief of medical oncology at Yale Cancer Centre in the U.S., said precision medicine was ” about finding the right key for the lock, finding out what it is that is driving the tumour, what makes it tick”. “Aromatase inhibitors are now readily available around the world and therefore our results will further improve the outcome of women with breast cancer globally”, said Prof.
Research on more than 300 women with early-stage breast cancer reinforces earlier work which suggests diet may play an important role in cutting cancer risk.
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”.
A separate study presented at the 2016 ASCO conference in Chicago found that combining two immunotherapy drugs resulted more effective than using a single drug treatment in patients with advanced lung cancer.
Prof Goss said women derived “equal benefit” from staying on AIs for 10 years, regardless of whether they had received tamoxifen beforehand.
Scientists found that a daily brisk walk of 25 minutes nearly halved the mortality among breast cancer patients while a waistline larger than 35 inches rose death rates by a third.
The trial also showed that surgery in younger women with less aggressive cancers resulted in longer average survival than in women with more aggressive cancers that had spread to the liver or lungs. This is highly-anticipated data, and most cancer specialists anticipate that in the future, guidelines will change to reflect this.
“Additionally, prices for drugs are increasing which can directly impact patient spending if their plans use coinsurance – where the patient pays a percentage of the price rather than a fixed copayment”, said Dusetzina, who was a co-author of the study.
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. It enrolled 1,918 women, some of whom took an aromatase inhibitor called letrozole for 10 years, while the rest were given placebo pills.
Researchers believe achieving a healthier weight could cut the risk by a fifth in breast cancer.
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He thought women who were at higher risk of cancer returning because they had experienced more invasive disease in the first place might be more inclined to stay on the drugs for longer.
