Word: drugged
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Last week's J.A.M.A. study seemed to tip the balance even further in raloxifene's favor. Researchers, led by Dr. Steven Cummings of the University of California at San Francisco, reported that taking the drug for 3 1/2 years reduced a woman's risk of developing breast cancer an average of 75%. By contrast, a study of tamoxifen completed last year showed that it reduced the incidence of breast cancer 45% over four years. As an added bonus, raloxifene also lowered the amount of LDL, or "bad cholesterol," in the blood...
...would be a mistake, however, to conclude that raloxifene must be the better drug; the two studies are not directly comparable. The J.A.M.A. study looked at women who had a low risk of developing breast cancer, whereas the tamoxifen experiment was conducted using women who had a high risk of getting the disease. Yet women with a high risk of breast cancer are less likely to develop the kind of estrogen-sensitive tumors that respond to designer estrogens...
Similarly, neither drug is likely to help women who have inherited the BRCA1 or BRCA2 genes, since they are least likely of all to develop estrogen-sensitive tumors. Nor is there any guarantee that raloxifene's effects are long lasting...
...raloxifene, with results expected in about five years. In the meantime, it may be that the only women who should consider raloxifene are those at highest risk of osteoporosis--the group for whom it was originally designed. (If that includes you, you should also consult your doctor about another drug, called alendronate, that may do a better job of preventing osteoporosis, although it gives some people severe heartburn.) The trick, as always, is to weigh the risks and benefits of drug treatment against your particular needs and medical history...
...shock erratic heartbeats back to normal in thousands of patients with atrial fibrillation. But about 20% of the time, electrically charged paddles don't do the trick. Now there's help. A new study shows that defibrillators can work in problem cases if patients are first treated with a drug called ibutilide...