Drugs Can Cut Breast Cancer Risk for Some, Task Force Finds

By Carina Storrs HealthDay Reporter

MONDAY, April 15 (HealthDay News) -- The drugs tamoxifen and raloxifene (Evista) could reduce the risk of breast cancer among women who are at high risk of developing the disease, a new report confirms.

Along with the report, the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force also issued draft recommendations that reflect those findings, which will be published in the April 16 issue of the Annals of Internal Medicine.

The task force recommendations state that doctors should talk about the potential benefits and harms of taking drugs to prevent breast cancer, a strategy known as chemoprevention, with patients who are at high risk of developing breast cancer.

That guideline is consistent with that of the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists and the American Cancer Society, and reflects current clinical practice, the task force said.

"We had a nice set of well-done, large [studies], so we have a lot of confidence in the results to really inform the recommendations," said report author Dr. Heidi Nelson, a research professor of medical informatics and clinical epidemiology at the Oregon Health and Science University in Portland. Nelson and the other report authors are not task force members and were contracted by the panel to analyze and summarize the latest research for the report.

One of the report's key findings was that studies of tamoxifen reported a decrease in breast cancer incidence from 23.5 per 1,000 women in the placebo group to 16.5 per 1,000 among women taking tamoxifen over a five-year period. Nelson and her colleagues arrived at these numbers by analyzing four studies of women who took tamoxifen for about four years and their rates of breast cancer over the following seven to 13 years.

Another advance since the 2002 recommendations is a 2010 study that compared tamoxifen and raloxifene directly. "Tamoxifen is more effective at reducing breast cancer risk, but it has more side effects," Nelson said. In this study, there were five fewer cancers per 1,000 women taking tamoxifen when compared with raloxifene.

For both drugs, the benefits have to be weighed against the potential harms, Nelson said. "The tricky part is finding the right candidate" who is at increased risk of breast cancer and has a low risk of experiencing adverse events from the medications, she added.

The report looked at the rates of adverse events such as blood clots, which was about 90 percent more likely in studies of women taking tamoxifen and 60 percent more likely among women taking raloxifene. For tamoxifen, 8.6 per 1,000 women experienced a blood clot compared with 4.6 per 1,000 in the "control" group.

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Drugs Can Cut Breast Cancer Risk for Some, Task Force Finds