Once Prempro was found to cause cancer and greater difficulty in reading mammograms that would detect same, Selective Estrogen Receptor Modulators or SERMs surfaced (the "bird.")
SERMS like tamoxifen and Evista could help mammogram readability and prevent and/or treat breast cancer. Except they could contribute to endometrial and ovarian cancer. Anyone see where this is going?
No wonder when the news broke last week that bisphosphonate bone drugs like Fosamax and Boniva could reduce the incidence of breast cancer, women reacted with another American folkism: "Fool Me Twice, Shame on Me."
Sure the re-analysis of Women's Health Initiative data (WHI) by original author Rowan Chlebowski, MD, found women taking the bone drugs had 31 percent less invasive breast cancer after seven years. But the women on bisphosphonates in the paper presented at the Annual San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium were also more likely to get noninvasive breast cancer called ductal carcinoma in situ (DCIS).
This is not the only example of the choice given to women of "trading" one cancer for another--some termed "good cancer"-- thanks to Wall Street wonder drugs that make women into lab animals. In fact within hours of the news, "Study Shows Merck's Fosamax May Fight Breast Cancer," appeared on Portfolio.com.
Hormone therapy's slight ability to reduce the risk of colon cancer is still marketed by Prempro makers, despite its increasing the risk of breast cancer, heart attacks, stroke and blood clots and contributing to asthma, lupus, scleroderma, non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, urinary incontinence, hearing loss, malignant melanoma and dementia according to journal articles.
In fact, a Wyeth-funded article in the current issue of the Journal of Women's Health discovers, when speculating about the cost of colon cancer that hormone patients might not incur, that hormone therapy is "cost effective." (Volume 18, Number 10) The Wyeth authors don't discuss how long women need to take hormones since the colon effect doesn't remain after hormone discontinuation and women are supposed to take hormones for the shortest amount of time and at the lowest dose possible.
Gad Rennert, MD of the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa, Israel, a second presenter about bisphosphonate reduced breast cancer data in San Antonio last week, also touts hormone therapy's colon cancer benefit in the September 20, 2009 issue of the Journal of Clinical Oncology.
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
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