Evista protects against breast cancer

Eli Lilly's Evista, which is used to prevent and treat osteoporosis, curbs the risk of breast cancer in postmenopausal women regardless of whether they have risk factors for breast cancer or not, according to a new study.

That finding comes from analyses of data on 7,705 women in the Multiple Outcomes of Raloxifene Evaluation (MORE) trial and 4,011 in the Continuing Outcomes Relevant to Evista (CORE) trial. Raloxifene is the generic name of Evista.

Dr. Marc E. Lippman of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor said: "The most important observation is that when we look at different groups of women who might be expected to have differing risks of breast cancer - and conceivably differing protective effects of raloxifene - we do not detect important differences in relative benefit of raloxifene in preventing breast cancer."

Over the 8 years of the MORE and CORE trials, treatment of postmenopausal women with raloxifene was associated with a significant 66 percent decrease in the incidence of breast cancer.

Lippman and his colleagues assessed the effect of raloxifene on invasive breast cancer incidence by the predicted level of breast cancer risk (higher versus lower risk) using both MORE and CORE data.

Among women given an inactive placebo, older age (65 years or older), higher estrogen level, and a family history of breast cancer were tied to an increased breast cancer risk, the researchers report in the journal Clinical Cancer Research.

Treatment with raloxifene reduced the risk of breast cancer markedly both in women at lower and those at higher breast cancer risk. There was a "33 percent to 89 percent reduction in breast cancer risk with raloxifene versus placebo," the investigators report.

Raloxifene's effect was more pronounced in women with a family history of breast cancer.

SOURCE: Clinical Cancer Research, September 1, 2006.