• Prescrire international · Aug 2001

    Exemestane: new preparation. No tangible advance in metastatic breast cancer after tamoxifen failure.

    • Prescrire Int. 2001 Aug 1; 10 (54): 108-9.

    Abstract(1) The reference second-line hormone treatment for breast cancer in postmenopausal women, after failure of anti-oestrogen therapy, is an aromatase inhibitor such as letrozole. (2) The clinical assessment file on exemestane, a new aromatase inhibitor licensed for this indication, contains no data from clinical trials versus letrozole or anastrozole, the other oral aromatase inhibitors. Data from non comparative trials fail to show whether cross-resistance between aromatase inhibitors exists. (3) In a double-blind trial involving 769 patients in whom tamoxifen had failed, the antitumour effect of exemestane appeared to be equivalent to that of the progestagen megestrol. (4) This trial showed that the adverse effect profile of exemestane was similar to that of other aromatase inhibitors, with mainly vasomotor flushes, nausea, fatigue and sweating. (5) In practice, the arrival of exemestane changes nothing in the hormone therapy of breast cancer in postmenopausal women, which should consist of tamoxifen (an anti-oestrogen) first; followed by the aromatase inhibitor letrozole if tamoxifen fails.

      Pubmed     Copy Citation     Plaintext  

      Add institutional full text...

    Notes

     
    Knowledge, pearl, summary or comment to share?
    300 characters remaining
    help        
    You can also include formatting, links, images and footnotes in your notes
    • Simple formatting can be added to notes, such as *italics*, _underline_ or **bold**.
    • Superscript can be denoted by <sup>text</sup> and subscript <sub>text</sub>.
    • Numbered or bulleted lists can be created using either numbered lines 1. 2. 3., hyphens - or asterisks *.
    • Links can be included with: [my link to pubmed](http://pubmed.com)
    • Images can be included with: ![alt text](https://bestmedicaljournal.com/study_graph.jpg "Image Title Text")
    • For footnotes use [^1](This is a footnote.) inline.
    • Or use an inline reference [^1] to refer to a longer footnote elseweher in the document [^1]: This is a long footnote..

    hide…