Interview
with Neil Love, MD from Breast Cancer Update for Medical Oncologists,
Program 1 2000
Play
Audio Below:
This
is the first time that we can show clearly the time to progression
of an newer endocrine agent is better than the tamoxifen overall
yardstick, through which we measure all the endocrine therapies.
I think it was kind of a very pleasant surprise to see that patients,
especially in the North American study which is actually more homogeneous
type of patient population - that where you have almost close to
90% of the patients are known ER-positive, where you could truly
test the efficacy of any endocrine agent and over there showing
that the patients treated with anastrozole, but doing substantially
better that the risk reduction are in favor of progression was like
1.44 - meaning that any given time there was 44% lower risk of relapse
in the patients who were on the anastrozole compared to the tamoxifen,
and seem that the time to progression was much longer. Of course
the survival data is too early, but my feeling is that I think with
more follow-up, the survival will parallel the time to progression.
It is substantial reduction, but the numbers are that it’s
several months longer control of the disease with anastrozole compared
to the tamoxifen.
Critique
of survival update analysis from two phase III anastrozole clinical
trials. Buzdar, A. U.; Wood; Wolter; Vogel; Bland, and Ravdin.
Annals of Surgical Oncology. 6(8 Suppl S):8S-11S, 1999 Dec. No
abstract
