But some experts were cautious about predicting changes in treatment strategies.
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But they warned there were risks, including osteoporosis.
Visitors to the Metastatic Breast Cancer Project website are invited to “help transform our understanding of metastatic breast cancer”. Researchers said that around 80% of the tumors are fueled by the female sex hormone, oestrogen.
Results showed that those who received results over the phone did not have any more anxiety, worry about cancer-risk, or depression than those whose services were delivered in person, even among participants whose tests were positive for a cancer causing genetic mutations.
Most women are prescribed aromatase inhibitors following breast cancer although some younger patients are offered Tamoxifen for two years first.
In the study, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, 1,918 post-menopausal women with early-stage breast cancer were split into two groups of either five or 10 years on AIs.
The data, presented to the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO), showed that cancer recurrence was cut by 34%.
But many women on the trial had already taken other hormonal drugs before starting on aromatase inhibitors and benefited from 15 years of treatment. “Prof Paul Goss, one of the researchers from Massachusetts General Hospital, said: “[The study] will have an enormous impact, a reduction in recurrences is a very important finding.
“At the end of the study, 95% of women were still cancer-free if they had taken the extra medication, compared with 91% without”.
“I am quite convinced but I think we need the data to really prove it, but also to look at who benefits”. The Company believes that neratinib has clinical application in the treatment of several other cancers as well, including non-small cell lung cancer and other tumor types that over-express or have a mutation in HER2.
The study, “Treatment beyond progression with nivolumab (nivo) in patients (pts) with advanced renal cell carcinoma (aRCC) in the phase III CheckMate 025 study”, is ASCO 2016 abstract 4509 and will be exhibited on board no. 132 during the Genitourinary (Nonprostate) Cancer poster session Monday, June 6, from 1 p.m.to 4:30 p.m. CDT in McCormick Place, Hall A. The study will be presented during a poster discussion session Monday, June 6, from 4:45 p.m.to 6 p.m. CDT in the Arie Crown Theatre. As a result, many oncologists recommend more aggressive therapeutic regimens for these patients such as extending anti-estrogen therapy for five additional years after completion of the first five years. Side effects of the treatment included loss of libido, hot flushes and vaginal dryness.
“Nivolumab monotherapy demonstrated encouraging activity in patients with high microsatellite instability status and the combination also demonstrated promising preliminary activity”, Dr Overman noted.
Experts said it should be a decision between doctor and patient whether to continue.
Dr Harold Bernstein, Associate Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School, hopes the findings will help women understand their options better. “For lower-risk patients, the benefits are narrow enough that they may opt against it”, he said.
But according to the study, if a woman takes the necessary steps to live a healthy lifestyle, she can reduce her chances down to 11 percent.
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“The important thing is that the AIs should be extended beyond five years, to 10 years”, he said, adding that women reported no worse quality of life when taking the drugs for longer. To be eligible for the study, women had a diagnosis of EOC, fallopian tube, or primary peritoneal cancer stage IIB-IV at diagnosis and had received neoadjuvant chemotherapy followed by optimal debulking surgery (with remaining tumors measuring 1 cm).
