BEIJING, Dec. 29(Xinhuanet) -- Femara, a drug for breast cancer, has proved more effective in preventing cancer recurrence than tamoxifen, a new study finds.
For women whose cancer had spread to lymph nodes by the time it was diagnosed, taking Femara reduced the risk of recurrence by 29 percent, compared with tamoxifen, the gold standard treatment.
"Letrozole improves outcome better than tamoxifen for postmenopausal women with hormone-receptor-positive breast cancer," said study author Richard D. Gelber, a professor in the Department of Biostatistics and Computational Biology at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, in Boston.
In their study, Gelber and his colleagues selected 4,003 women to receive letrozole and 4,007 to receive tamoxifen. During more than two years of follow-up, the researchers found that 84 percent of the women taking letrozole did not have a recurrence of breast cancer, compared with 81.4 percent of the women taking tamoxifen.
Femara is currently approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration only to treat patients with advanced breast cancer, and those who have had surgery followed by five years of treatment with tamoxifen.
The study results will be published in Thursday's edition of the New England Journal of Medicine.
(Agencies)
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