New breast cancer treatment may dispense with the need for chemotherapy

May 21 2007

According to the latest research new hormone therapy drugs designed to treat breast cancer may dispense with the need for chemotherapy thus avoiding the nasty side effects associated with the treatment.

The new hormone therapy could be of particular help to younger women who have a specific type of breast cancer which is encouraged by the presence of estrogen.

British researchers say the drugs called luteinising-hormone-releasing hormone (LHRH) agonists, appear to be effective alone or combined with other treatments in fighting such cancers.

For the study Jack Cuzick, a professor from the University of London, and colleagues collected data from 16 trials on almost 12,000 pre menopausal women who had developed early-stage breast cancer and they found that 25 percent of breast cancer cases occur in women under age 50.

The team found that hormone therapy drugs such as Zoladex were found to be as effective as traditional chemotherapy treatments in women under 40 years of age, with far fewer side effects.

The women were given a once-month dosage of Zoladex, implanted under the skin of the stomach to treat hormone-sensitive cancers which are responsible for two-thirds of all cancers in younger women.

Zoladex was originally developed to treat prostate cancer but has also been used to treat breast cancer for some years and experts believe the drugs can also save women's fertility as well as their lives.

Professor Cuzickcet says the findings are important because they offer an additional approach to treating hormone-sensitive breast cancer which is as effective as chemotherapy without the unpleasant side effects and without jeopardising fertility.

The researchers say that when LHRH agonists were combined with chemotherapy or Tamoxifen, the combined treatment reduced a woman's risk for breast cancer recurrence by almost 13 percent and her risk of death after recurrence by 15 percent.

However the researchers say the combined treatments only benefited women under 40.

Experts say that it is increasingly more common for breast cancer to be treated by a combination of treatments and many doctors may now consider adding LHRH to chemotherapy or Tamoxifen.