Increasingly Severe Side Effects Of Aromatase Inhibitors May Make Tamoxifen First The Best Strategy - Food for Breast Cancer

Arimidex. I still shudder when I think of my experience with this drug. I'm glad that there are, at least, studies being conducted on this class of drugs. Improvements in preventing recurrences would be great ... until they find a way to prevent breast cancer (and other cancers) in the first place, that is.

One of the things this study is saying is that Aromatase Inhibitors (of which Arimidex is one) improve your odds (over Tamoxifen ... just slightly) of not dieing from breast cancer. On the other hand its toxicity is such that it increases your odds of dieing earlier from other causes which can be caused or contributed to by AI's. It's recommending that a couple of years on Tamoxifen and then switching to an AI might be the best balance. Hmmmm ... seems to me we're kind of damned if we do and damned if we don't. But I knew that already. That's just the current breast cancer lay of the land.

Increasingly Severe Side Effects Of Aromatase Inhibitors May Make Tamoxifen First The Best Strategy - Food for Breast Cancer:

"Longer duration of aromatase inhibitor use was found to be associated with increased risk of developing bone fractures and cardiovascular disease, but a lower risk of uterine cancer and blood clots. This conforms to previous findings that tamoxifen increases the risk of uterine cancer and blood clots. Five years of treatment with aromatase inhibitors was associated with a tendency toward increased risk of non-breast cancer specific death compared to five years of tamoxifen alone or tamoxifen for two to three years followed by an aromatase inhibitor for two to three years, but this result was not statistically significant. The authors conclude that the cumulative toxicity of aromatase inhibitors when used as up-front treatment may explain the lack of overall survival benefit compared to tamoxifen despite improvements in breast cancer-free survival. Switching from tamoxifen to aromatase inhibitors reduces this toxicity and is likely the best balance between efficacy and toxicity, according to the authors."

Read more at the above link.