New research suggests postmenopausal overweight or obese breast cancer patients who are receiving hormone therapy as part of their treatment and who use nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs) such as ibuprofen or aspirin have a decreased risk of recurrence.
The research suggests a new possibility for reducing the risk of breast cancer recurrence in this group of women, the University of Texas at Austin reported.
To make their findings the researchers performed a retrospective analysis of human subjects and cell cultures. NSAIDs were found to reduce the risk of a recurrence of ERα positive breast cancer by 50 percent or delay its return but about two years. ER positive breast cancers grow in response to estrogen, and make up 75 percent of all breast cancer diagnosis.
"Overweight or obese women diagnosed with breast cancer are facing a worse prognosis than normal-weight women," said cancer researcher Linda deGraffenried of The University of Texas at Austin. "We believe that obese women are facing a different disease. There are changes at the molecular level. We seek to modulate the disease promoting effects of obesity."
The research team looked at 440 breast cancer patients ad compared those who took NSAIDs with those who did not.
The team also designed a second study to look at how breast cancer cells behaved in the body by dousing ERα positive breast cancer cells in blood serum from obese women, hoping to mimic the environment in which tumors grow. Researchers believe inflammation plays a pivotal role in breast cancer. The team found aromatase inhibitors (a class of drug used to prevent cancer recurrence) respond negatively to inflammation.
"Clinicians are finding that the five-year recurrence rate for postmenopausal women is much higher on aromatase inhibitors when the patient is obese," deGraffenried said. "We would like to identify which women are most likely to benefit from interventions like adding NSAIDs to treatment regimens."
"What this study does is present great promise that a fairly inexpensive and nontoxic agent might benefit obese and overweight breast cancer patients who are at a higher risk of aromatase inhibitor failure - but further studies are needed to confirm these results," researcher Laura Bowers said.
