Extending hormonal therapy to 10 years could benefit women with early stage breast cancer, reported The New York Times. Current practices require women to take an estrogen suppressing drug for 5 years, but the results from a recent study involving postmenopausal women given an aromatase inhibitor show a reduced risk of cancer recurrence or new cases of cancer developing. “These data are important to millions of women around the world,” said breast cancer expert, Harold J. Burstein, a spokesman for ASCO. “(The results) suggest that longer durations of a widely available therapy reduce the risk of cancer recurrence and prevent second cancers from arising.” Some experts noted that women who took the drug for 10 years did not live longer overall than the control group. Additionally, it was unclear if the benefit of 10 years of an aromatase inhibitor outweighed the risk of adverse events like bone loss and joint and muscle pain.
Combination cancer therapies using multiple drugs has proven to be more effective than just 1 or 2 drugs, but this treatment approach comes at a high cost, posing a dilemma for patients and insurers. According to The Wall Street Journal, critics are concerned these high costs are putting a strain on budgets and often times seem unrelated to how well the drugs works. The tension continues to increase as this approach begins to spread. “We have to think about it the benefit from combination therapies is worth the cost,” said Daniel Goldstein, medical oncologist at Rabin Medical Center in Israel. President of the Institute for Clinical and Economic Review Steve Pearson suggest that drug companies should work together to offer group discounts on the combination treatment. Although some drug manufacturers would consider the discounts, they note that there are challenges to this approach because of the fragmented health insurance system in the United States.
