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Aromatase inhibitors in adjuvant therapy: promise and uncertainty
University of Texas Health Sciences Center, San Antonio, TX
The advent of aromatase inhibitors marks a broadening and an improvement in the options available for the adjuvant therapy of patients with hormone-responsive breast cancer. Patients and their healthcare teams are switching from primarily using only tamoxifen as adjuvant hormonal therapy to this new class of agents. They are doing so for efficacy and/or safety advantages that have been demonstrated in major clinical trials. However, in making this switch, they are also accepting more uncertainty because of the lack of long-term information, particularly past the first 5 years, about aromatase inhibitor use in the adjuvant therapy of breast cancer. Questions also remain about the best strategy for using these agents in terms of efficacy, duration of use, their long-term safety, and whether biomarkers are useful in selecting patients who would most benefit from aromatase inhibitor therapy versus tamoxifen.
| Commun Oncol 2004;1:219–224 | full text |  161 kb |