ATLAS
trial: Adjuvant Tamoxifen Longer Against Shorter
Interview
with Neil Love, MD Breast Cancer Update for Medical Oncologists,
Program 6 2000
Play
Audio Below:
When
we look at five years versus 10 years, again, to get reliable answers
there there’s going to need to be randomization of 10-20,000
women with long-term follow-up. And there are some trials —
Christina Davies, for example, is organizing what should be the
biggest tamoxifen trial in the world, looking at 10 years versus
five years of tamoxifen. She’s organized a collaboration involving
about 30 or 40 countries, with about 1,500 doctors collaborating.
And the aim is — I think her aim is — to randomize about
10-15,000 patients between now and 2005. But she won’t get
any results from that until about the year 2010, so it's a very
long process. And then the results that she does get will basically
say whether 10 years of hormonal treatment is better than five years
of hormonal treatment in terms of what the effect on breast cancer
is. You know the side effects may be specific to particular drugs,
but the main effect, I think, is likely to be generic. It’ll
be hormonal treatment, and in terms of 20-year outcome, is 10 years
of hormonal treatment better than five years? And the principal
measure of outcome, the principal measure of success, will be what
happens in the second decade after diagnosis. If you start off with
diagnosis in terms of 20-year outcome, is 10 years of treatment
better than five years of treatment in terms of particularly what
happens in the second decade after diagnosis. It’s all very
long term, unfortunately, but you know in the end, the answers will
be in and they’ll be relevant for decades after they are in.
