HealthDay News — For women with estrogen receptor (ER)-positive early breast cancer, continuing tamoxifen to 10 years correlates with reduced risk of recurrence and lower breast cancer-specific and overall mortality, researchers found.
Richard Gray, MSc, of the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom, presented results from the Adjuvant Tamoxifen: Longer Against Shorter (ATLAS) trial at the 2013 San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium (SABCS) and online in Lancet.
Gray and colleagues enrolled 12,894 women, who had early breast cancer and had completed five years of treatment, and randomly assigned them to continue treatment to 10 years or stop at five years (open control). The effects on outcome were reported for the 6,846 women with ER-positive disease.
Continue Reading
The researchers found that continuation of tamoxifen correlated with significant reductions in the risk of breast cancer recurrence, breast cancer mortality and overall mortality. The reductions were less extreme before year 10 compared with after year 10 (recurrence rate ratio, 0.90 during years five to nine and 0.75 in later years; breast cancer mortality rate ratio, 0.97 during years five to nine and 0.71 in later years).
During years five to 14, the cumulative risk of recurrence was 21.4% for women allocated to continue tamoxifen and 25.1% for controls, and breast cancer mortality was 12.2% and 15%, respectively. Long-term follow-up is ongoing.
“These results, taken together with results from previous trials of five years of tamoxifen treatment versus none, suggest that 10 years of tamoxifen treatment can approximately halve breast cancer mortality during the second decade after diagnosis,” the researchers concluded.
