August 18, 2016 -Duration of Treatment

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Anchor lead: How long should women take hormone treatments after breast cancer? Elizabeth Tracey reports

Women who’ve had the most common type of breast cancer often take hormone therapy for years to prevent recurrence, but how long should that go on?  A new study concludes that 10 years on a class of medications known as aromatase inhibitors results in better outcomes than shorter periods.  Ben Park, a breast cancer expert at Johns Hopkins, comments.

Park: There were something like almost a thousand patients in each arm of this.  This actually confirms what we already knew from the taxoxifen trials that as a group, longer endocrine therapy is better. It does come with some side effects as one can imagine. Osteoporosis is a big one.  But I think what this is really telling us from a scientific standpoint is that women who really have microscopic metastatic disease that is estrogen receptor positive, that all of these studies all of this data coming out that what it is really doing is inducing states of dormancy.  :33

At Johns Hopkins, I’m Elizabeth Tracey.