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Sept. 20, 2006 -- For more than two decades, tamoxifen has been the estrogen-targeting drug of choice for treating breast cancer. But evidence is mounting that newer drugs help patients with advanced disease live longer.
An analysis of 23 studies comparing the newer therapies, known as aromatase inhibitors, with standard hormonal treatments, suggests a clear survival advantage for women taking the newer drugs. Aromatase inhibitors work by lowering the amount of estrogen in the body.
From the pooled analysis, the researchers estimate that an advanced breast cancercancer patient normally expected to live 2.5 years would get, on average, an additional four months of life by taking a third-generation (the newest) aromatase inhibitor instead of tamoxifen.
For a patient with an expected 10-month survival, there would be about a one-month increase.
Advanced cancer was defined as either cancer that has spread outside the breast area, recurrent breast cancer, or cancer in the breast area that is inoperable.
"I would say that the evidence is fairly convincing that the third-generation aromatase inhibitors can improve survival in patients with advanced disease," John P.A. Ioannidis, MD, co-author of the analysis, tells WebMD.
Aromatase Inhibitors Widely Used
Aromatase inhibitors are now widely used in the U.S. to treat both early stage and advanced hormone-receptor-positive breast cancers -- cancers that use estrogen to grow -- in postmenopausal women.
However, a clear survival advantage for this treatment over tamoxifen has not been proven.
In an effort to better understand the effectiveness of aromatase inhibitors in patients with advanced disease, Ioannidis and colleagues analyzed studies that compared the newer drugs head to head with tamoxifen.
The pooled studies included 4,559 patients treated with aromatase inhibitors and 3,945 patients treated with tamoxifen or other standard hormone therapies.
The researchers found no survival advantage for patients taking the earliest aromatase inhibitors over tamoxifen.
But a survival advantage was seen in patients taking the third-generation of the drugs, such as Arimidex, Aromasin, Femara, and Rivizor.
The researchers concluded that these drugs should be considered the accepted initial treatment for patients with advanced breast cancer.
Their findings are published in the Sept. 20 issue of the Journal of the National Cancer Institute.