Estrogen For Breast Cancer Treatment?

estrogenIn stark contrast with many commonly held views in the medical community; that of estrogen having a causal link with breast cancer, researchers have now reported that estrogen has actually been seen to shrink tumors that had become resistant to anti estrogen therapies.

It is being hailed as a paradoxical strategy to treat breast cancer, and a study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association are preliminary but promising since they hold out the hope that a new cure for cancer may have been discovered.

Neither is using estrogen to treat breast cancer a novel concept; having been used first in the 1940’s when diethylstilbestrol or DES [a synthetic estrogen] was used to treat advanced breast cancer patients.

The anti estrogen trend started out in the 1970’s with Tamoxifen and now by even stronger anti estrogen medications or aromatase inhibitors. So in a sense this ‘new’ therapy is not new at all, and is actually a reversion to prior medical practices.

In this study, which sought to prove that that lower doses of estrogen might work, 66 women who had metastatic breast cancer were given 6 milligrams or 30 milligrams of oral estradiol (estrogen) everyday.

Each of the women had been treated previously with an aromatase inhibitor but had not been cured. It was found that tumors shrinking or not growing in about 30 percent of the women.