Super-hormone treatments could reduce risk of recurrence
Breast cancer: Alternative may preserve child-bearing ability
The effects of the drugs are not as permanent as surgery.

By The Associated Press

Published: December 18, 2006

SAN ANTONIO — Robin Khadduri gets monthly shots of a drug that blocks the male hormone testosterone and often is used to treat prostate cancer.

But Khadduri doesn't have a prostate or much testosterone either. She and many other young women are getting the drug for breast cancer as part of a super-hormone treatment that new research suggests may improve their survival odds.

This chemical equivalent of ovary removal has one big advantage over surgery: It's not permanent, so it may preserve a woman's ability to have children.

In premenopausal women, the drugs suppress the pituitary gland, which produces hormones that control the ovaries and cause a woman to have a period every month. Side effects of this induced early menopause are similar to those of natural menopause — hot flashes, night sweats, etc., according to new research presented at the San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium, which ended Sunday.

Women like Khadduri, who fear cancer's return, consider that a small price to pay.

The drugs include triptorelin, goserelin, leuprolide and buserelin, sold as Lupron, Zoladex, Prostap and other brands.

The drugs often are used as an alternative to chemotherapy or to suppress the ovaries of women whose periods return after temporarily stopping during chemotherapy.

In the latest research, Jack Cuzick of the Wolfson Institute of Preventive Medicine in London combined results from more than a dozen studies involving 9,000 women from 1987 to 2001.

Those that tested ovary-suppressing drugs on top or in place of chemotherapy and standard hormone therapy with tamoxifen found a lower risk of recurrence after an average of seven years — 24 percent versus 29 percent — among women given the more intense treatment.

Such women also had a smaller risk of death — 11 percent versus 13 percent.

A second report at the cancer conference reinforced the value of ovarian suppression.

Dr. Michael Gnant of the Medical University of Vienna in Austria reported that women whose periods did not return after chemotherapy had lower cancer relapse rates.