Kenechukwu Osude - Department of Family Medicine
To pave a road for the future, one must look back on paths already made in the past. Regarding breast cancer prophylactics, a notable contribution from Cuzick et al. offered the academic community a possible preventative treatment for breast cancer.
The method of this study included a double-blind placebo-controlled randomized trial of tamoxifen treatment, 20 mg/day over five years among over seven thousand women ages 35-70 years old with high risk for breast cancer. The method attempts to draw the outcome of the frequency of breast cancer among the population. The primary outcome measure was the frequency of breast cancer. Among the placebo group and the tamoxifen-treated group, the authors calculated a 32% risk reduction (p=0.013), and notably, thromboembolic events increased within the tamoxifen-treated group (p=0.001).
Among the patient population, prophylactic tamoxifen can reduce the risk of breast cancer by almost a third; however, its use should be cautioned for patients with thromboembolic diseases or possibly supplemented with antithrombotic medications. In all, this study provides significant results that direct the academic community toward preventative measures against one of the most common cancers.
References:
Cuzick, J., Forbes, J., Edwards, R., Baum, M., Cawthorn, S., Coates, A., Hamed, A., Howell, A., & Powles, T. (2002). First results from the International Breast Cancer Intervention Study (IBIS-I): A randomised prevention trial. The Lancet, 360(9336), 817–824. https://doi.org/10.1016/s0140-6736(02)09962-2
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