BMJ 1996;313:493-494 (24 August)

Letters

Adjuvant treatment with tamoxifen

Care is necessary

EDITOR,--Michael Baum and Jack Cuzick1 object to my comments about a clinical announcement by the National Cancer Institute that a trial comparing five years of adjuvant treatment with tamoxifen for breast cancer with a longer period of such treatment has been stopped.2 They say that the announcement is a "dubious and previously discredited process" (why?) and is based on unpublished data. Table 1 gives the data, which are available under the American Freedom of Information Act. 


Table 1--Data available from trial comparing short
term (five years') treatment with adjuvant tamoxifen
with longer term treatment (eight years and seven
months) for breast cancer. Figures are numbers of
women except where otherwise stated
-----------------------------------------------------
                         Short term   Long term
                         treatment    treatment
-----------------------------------------------------
Survival (%)                 96      94 (P = 0.11)
Event free survival (%)      92      86 (P = 0.016)
Recurrence                   10            23
Death                        13            23
Cancer in contralateral
 breast                       5             6
. . . [Full text of this article]


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Relevant Article

Recruitment into studies assessing optimum duration of treatment must continue
Helena Earl, Pat Baker, David Kerr, Martin Lee, Richard Gray, and Michael Baum
BMJ 1996 312: 1036-1037. [Extract] [Full Text]

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