Cancer Research Lab

About one third of women with breast cancer who are prescribed tamoxifen stop taking the drug well before the end of the optimum 5 years of treatment, and thus jeopardize their chances for treatment success, Irish researchers report.

The discontinuation rate of tamoxifen treatment observed in current clinical practice is nearly twice that observed in controlled clinical trials, Dr. Thomas I. Barron and his associates report in the March 1st issue of Cancer. But clinical trials do not reflect “real-life” oncology practice, since patients tend to be carefully selected, highly motivated, and closely monitored, with adherence based on subjective self-reports.

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The use of growth hormone-releasing hormone (GHRH) antagonists seems to greatly increase the reduction in breast cancer volume achieved with docetaxel, the results of animal study show.

GHRH antagonists block tumor growth through direct and indirect pathways, and a number of the agents are currently being developed as anti-cancer therapies.

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Deficiency or inhibition of protein tyrosine phosphatase 1B (PTP1B) increases breast tumor latency and inhibits lung metastasis, Canadian researchers report in a January 28th advance online publication of Nature Genetics.

Dr. Sofi G. Julien at McGill University in Montreal and colleagues are working on an anti-PTP1B treatment that they are testing in mouse models of ErbB2-induced breast cancers.

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Adjuvant oophorectomy and tamoxifen significantly improve overall and disease-free survival in premenopausal women with operable breast cancer, according to a report in the Journal of Clinical Oncology for January.

This finding is particularly relevant for women in resource-poor countries where, unlike in Western countries, the breast cancer case burden mostly affects premenopausal women. Moreover, in contrast to their Western peers, patients from resource-poor countries often have limited access to cytotoxic chemotherapy.

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A team of scientists at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York has identified several endogenous human microRNAs that suppress breast cancer metastasis to lung and bone — the two main sites of metastatic spread of breast carcinoma.

In the January 10 issue of Nature, Dr. Sohail F. Tavazoie and colleagues report that their search for “general regulators of cancer metastasis has yielded a set of microRNAs for which expression is specifically lost as human breast cancer cells develop metastatic potential.”

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New research indicates that there is considerable variation in the risk of breast cancer among carriers of BRCA1/2 mutations.

“The major finding is that the risk appears to vary,” lead author Dr. Colin B. Begg told Reuters Health. For example, relatives of carriers diagnosed at young ages have higher risks than relatives of carriers diagnosed at older ages. Also, relatives of the women with contralateral breast cancer had higher (though not significantly higher) risks than relatives of women with a single breast cancer.”

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Pooled data from numerous studies indicate that contrast-enhanced magnetic resonance (MR) imaging has a high specificity in detection of breast cancer in patients with breast lesions, Dutch researchers report in the January issue of Radiology.

However, lead investigator Dr. Nicky H. G. M. Peters told Reuters Health that “MR mammography can improve diagnosis and treatment of patients with breast cancer, but biopsy remains necessary to definitively characterize lesions.”

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Treatment with docetaxel after doxorubicin therapy appears to increase disease-free survival in women with lymph node-positive breast cancer, according to study findings in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute for January 16.

The study involved 2887 patients who were randomized to receive standard CMF chemotherapy preceded by doxorubicin (sequential control), doxorubicin plus cyclophosphamide (concurrent control), doxorubicin and then docetaxel (sequential docetaxel), or doxorubicin plus docetaxel (concurrent docetaxel).

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Women who participate in a screening mammography program, compared with non-participants, tend to have better survival rates for cancers other than breast cancer, according to study results published in the January issue of the International Journal of Cancer.

However, “comparisons of cancer mortality between users and nonusers of screening are potentially biased because of the effects of self-selection,” Drs. Norm Phillips and Andrew Coldman, from the British Columbia Cancer Agency, Vancouver, Canada, point out. “Previous studies of breast screening have found that individuals likely to participate have lower breast cancer mortality than those unlikely to participate.”

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Anthracycline-based adjuvant chemotherapy for early breast cancer improves overall and disease-free survival only in women whose breast tumors overexpress or amplify HER2, results of a meta-analysis indicate.

“Patients with HER2-negative disease … could be spared unnecessary toxic effects related to the use of this class of agents,” the Italian research team suggests in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute for January 2.

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