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News From the Front Lines of Breast Cancer Research

December 12, 2008 3:06 PM

By AUDREY GRAYSON, ABC News Medical Unit

The San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium kicked off Wednesday night. Several thousand breast cancer researchers, clinicians and advocates from around the world will learn about the latest in breast cancer research and treatment. Here are a couple of the studies that piqued our interest.

An osteoporosis drug that shrinks tumors

Researchers have found that an osteoporosis drug has the surprising ability to shrink breast cancer tumors. When the drug zoledronic acid (Zometa) was paired with chemotherapy, women’s tumors shrank by just over half an inch, making them easier for doctors to remove surgically. The result was that more women were able to have lumpectomies, where only the tumor and a small amount of surrounding tissue are removed, rather than mastectomies.

How does it all work? We don’t know for sure, but this family of drugs may be inhibiting growth factors that are critical to tumor development, and in particular may be working to choke off the blood supply of tumors, causing them to wither, according to Dr. Stefan Gluck, clinical director, Braman Family Breast Cancer Institute, University of Miami.

Another theory is that by reducing bone metastases, doctors may actually be cutting off a communication link between the main site of breast cancer and the rest of the body, which may reduce the ability of the breast cancer to grow and spread, according to Dr. Cliff Hudis, chief, Breast Cancer Medicine Service, Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center.

Hormone therapy lowers risk of death from breast cancer?

This latest research on the breast cancer risk associated with hormone replacement therapy (HRT) finds that postmenopausal hormone use raises the risk of developing breast cancer in older women, but it reduced the odds that a woman will actually die from the disease if it does occur.

Researchers from the University of Southern California tracked 2,783 postmenopausal women for 10 years and found that those who currently or formerly used HRT were less likely to die from breast cancer. Women who took estrogen plus progestin were 47 percent less likely to die from breast cancer, and women who took estrogen alone were 18 percent less likely to die from breast cancer compared with those who did not take postmenopausal hormones.

Sometimes I wonder what women really think about hormone replacement therapy – does it raise one’s risk for breast cancer or does it not? With all of the conflicting evidence out there on HRT, it’s not hard to imagine why anyone would be confused. Some studies say HRT increases breast cancer risk and some say the opposite.

Last September, one study found that some women may actually have a reduced risk of breast cancer from taking postmenopausal hormones.

And this research was released only six months after another study, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, found that women taking postmenopausal hormones not only experienced an increase in breast cancer risk, but that the risk did not disappear after the patient stopped taking the hormones.

With all the conflicting data on HRT, postmenopausal women may have a very hard time deciding whether taking hormones is worth it. But there is one thing that breast cancer experts say that you can be sure of: this latest study should NOT give postmenopausal women an argument in favor of taking hormones as a method of reducing their risk of death from breast cancer.

“It would be inappropriate to recommend HRT with the intent of reducing breast cancer mortality,” said Dr. David Euhus, chair in Breast Cancer Surgery at the UT Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas.

“The fact that the cancers are often not fatal is good…but doesn't help the woman that is newly diagnosed and has to undergo surgery, radiation hormone and sometimes chemotherapy just to be sure that she will be one of the ones with a good prognosis,” said Dr. Susan Love, president and medical director of a research foundation in her name. “It certainly is not an argument in favor of HRT use.”

December 12, 2008 | Permalink | User Comments (1)

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Posted by: vjuiohfwz vxtspd | Mar 16, 2009 3:21:27 AM

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