New Drug Promising for Advanced Breast Cancer
Published:
5 October 2003 y., Sunday
A drug called exemestane may be a more effective first-line agent than tamoxifen for postmenopausal women with advanced breast cancer, European researchers report.
Tamoxifen works by blocking the effects of estrogen on tumor cells and is the most widely prescribed drug for breast cancer treatment.
Exemestane -- which is a member of a newer class of drugs called aromatase inhibitors -- decreases the overall amount of estrogen in the body. Both tamoxifen and aromatase inhibitors only work in patients who have breast tumors that carry hormone receptors, meaning that estrogen fuels the cancer growth.
Exemestane is currently approved for the treatment of advanced breast cancer in postmenopausal women whose tumors no longer respond to tamoxifen.
To see if exemestane would be an effective first-line agent, Dr. Robert Paridaens of the Universitair Ziekenhuis in Leuven, Belgium, and others randomly assigned 120 postmenopausal women with breast cancer that had spread to other areas of the body to daily treatment with exemestane 25 mg or tamoxifen 20 mg.
Independent reviewers, who didn't know which woman had been given what treatment, saw improvement in 41 percent of women treated with exemestane compared to just 17 percent of women treated with tamoxifen.
Šaltinis:
tehrantimes.com
Copying, publishing, announcing any information from the News.lt portal without written permission of News.lt editorial office is prohibited.
The most popular articles
The only physician in her village of Tsoniarisi, Mzevinar Bolkvadze sees patients all day in a newly built and equipped ambulatory.
more »
As of 7 September 2009, 48 of the 53 Member States in the WHO European Region had reported over 49 000 laboratory-confirmed cases of pandemic (H1N1) 2009 virus infection.
more »
China's food and drug administration say clinical trials of a vaccine against the H1N1 flu strain have been successful.
more »
As of 31 August 2009, 48 of the 53 Member States in the WHO European Region had reported laboratory-confirmed cases of pandemic (H1N1) 2009 virus infection.
more »
The European Union Health Security Committee and the Early Warning and Response authorities adopted a policy statement proposed by the European Commission which outlines a shared European approach towards identifying target and priority groups for A H1N1 vaccination.
more »
As of 20 August 2009, 47 of the 53 Member States in the WHO European Region had reported over 42 000 laboratory-confirmed cases of pandemic (H1N1) 2009 virus infection.
more »
About 1000 participants, mostly from North America, debated solutions to the obesity epidemic in the United States (US) at the Weight of the Nation conference, organized in Washington, USA, by the US Centers for Disease Control.
more »
The European Union Health Security Committee and the Early Warning and Response authorities (HSC/EWRS) unanimously adopted for the first time two policy statements proposed by the European Commission on public health measures for pandemic influenza A (H1N1) 2009.
more »
As of 10 August 2009, 46 of the 53 countries in the WHO European Region had reported over 33 000 laboratory-confirmed cases of pandemic (H1N1) 2009 virus infection, including 55 fatalities in 7 countries.
more »
The U.S. company Moog Medical Devices which acquired the company the Lithuanian Viltechmeda at the beginning of the year 2009, intends to invest EUR 2M in Lithuania in the nearest future, to establish a modern services centre.
more »