Clinical breast cancer
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Clinical breast cancer · Apr 2003
Review Randomized Controlled Trial Clinical TrialAnastrozole as adjuvant therapy for early-stage breast cancer: implications of the ATAC trial.
Tamoxifen has been the gold standard adjuvant therapeutic agent for postmenopausal women with hormone-sensitive breast cancer for > 25 years. Although it continues to play an important role in treating premenopausal women, tamoxifen's association with some serious safety and tolerability issues, including increased incidence of endometrial cancer and thromboembolic events, may be cause to limit its use in postmenopausal women. Anastrozole was the first drug to show improved efficacy and safety compared with standard therapies for first- and second-line therapy of hormone-sensitive advanced breast cancer in postmenopausal women. ⋯ The results of the ATAC trial show anastrozole to be more effective and better tolerated than tamoxifen in this group of patients, and an updated follow-up suggests the therapeutic index for anastrozole will continue to remain superior to that of tamoxifen. Anastrozole is now emerging as a new standard for the adjuvant treatment of postmenopausal women with hormone-sensitive early-stage breast cancer. New adjuvant trials are currently using anastrozole in the control arm.