Drugs normally used to fight bone loss may also prove to be a tool in the war on cancer. A new study published in the New England Journal of Medicine found that the bone-building drug Zometa lowered the risk that some breast cancers would spread or recur by a third.
The study involved over 1,800 premenopausal women with estrogen-dependant breast cancers. All were given drugs that prevent their ovaries from making estrogen along with drugs that thwart cancer cells from using estrogen to grow and spread.
Half of the patients also got the bone drug zolendronic acid, or Zometa, in a transfusion twice a year for three years. After almost four years, patients who took Zometa had a 36 percent reduction in the recurrence and spread of cancer when compared to those who received only chemo drugs.
Zolendronic acid and other bone drugs are used to treat osteoporosis and are also often given to cancer patients to prevent bone fractures.
“This is really a landmark study,” Dr. James N. Engle, head of the Mayo Clinic Cancer Center’s breast cancer research program. “It’s a reason for real enthusiasm,” he told The New York Times.
Still, he’s not ready to make bone drugs standard treatment for breast cancer. Other doctors aren’t quite so conservative. Since many women who undergo hormonal therapy for breast cancer also take drugs to protect their bones, it makes sense to some doctors to give women the same bone drug used in the study. “This is something of a mitzvah,” said Dr. Marc E. Lippman, chairman of the department of medicine at the University of Miami and an expert on breast cancer. “The very therapy you might want to do to counteract the toxicity” of the hormonal therapy “has an additional advantage.”
Other studies are underway to see if bone drugs may treat other types of cancer as well, including prostate and lung.
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