A recent study has revealed that an affordable breast cancer treatment is possible. The study concluded that two drugs could be able to fight with breast cancer and decrease the rate of fatalities in women who are post-menopausal. The study published by the team of scientists from the University of Oxford in London claims that breast cancer recurrence could be greatly prevented by combining two affordable drugs.
Breast cancer is the most common type of cancer for women, with a total of 25 percent of cancer cases and being responsible for around 520,000 deaths from the 1.68 million cancer cases recorded in 2012. The new study investigated which possible drugs could prevent the recurrence of breast cancer in women who are post-menopausal, after surgery.
The decrease in number of deaths from breast cancer every year has been reported by just simply changing the medication prescribed to these women. A study was conducted on 30,000 women who were post-menopausal and developed breast cancer over the course of one year. The treatment consisted of nine clinical trials, in which the patients were given aromatase inhibitors working as endocrine treatments in order for it to prevent the recurrence of breast cancer.
However, aromatase inhibitors have serious side effects, and one of the most important side effect of the drug is its impact on bone health. Fortunately, the second drug called bishphosnates prevents that.
After a period of 5 years, the death rates of the patients was drastically reduced by giving the patients a treatment based on the endocrine components from the aromatase inhibitors. The results are a lot better when compared to using the current tamoxifen, which is the endocrine therapy of choice at the moment.
The drug decreased the chances of developing breast cancer by one third and reduced the risk of death as a cause of breast cancer by around 15 percent in the following decade after the treatment. Treatments for cancer are already very expensive and groups of support are trying to cut the costs down. The scientists discovered that the affordable breast cancer treatment also helped in improving the rates of survival for patients after a two year period.
It is now extremely important for the drug manufacturers not to linger around while the patients are battling the serious disease and allow the recent study to prevent the loss of more lives.
The recent study has been published in The Lancet journal.
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Matthew Slotkin
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