Interview
with Neil Love, MD from Breast Cancer Update for Medical Oncologists,
Program 3 2000
Play
Audio Below:
There’s
no uniqueness about inter-treatment interval with tamoxifen as compared
to cisplatin or adriamycin or taxanes. Clearly if we induce mechanisms
of drug resistance, these mechanisms are usually not permanent but dynamic,
and the longer time between the initial drug exposure and the subsequent
drug exposure, the more likely that patients will respond. So I’m
certainly more apt to re-introduce tamoxifen for the treatment of metastatic
disease if it has been a number of years, preferably a large number of
years. For the patient who has completed five years of adjuvant tamoxifen
and relapses a year later, I’m more inclined to go to an aromatase
inhibitor rather than to re-introduce tamoxifen. For the patient –
obviously I am drawing the two ends of the spectrum — who has had
a five or greater year interval and then, I think the use of tamoxifen
again, should be expected to be effective.
