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 Hormone-driven breast cancer was less likely to return in overweight
women who regularly used anti-inflammatory medicines, they found.
But their findings don't prove the drugs prevent cancer and it's too
soon to tell women to start taking them to protect against cancer
recurrence, the researchers warn.
Still, senior researcher Linda deGraffenried of The University of
Texas in Austin told Reuters Health said, “I was probably as
surprised as anyone that we found such a dramatic effect that we
did.”
She and her colleagues write in the journal Cancer Research that in
past studies, breast cancer outcomes tended to be worse in obese
women than in thinner women.
That’s thought to be particularly true for postmenopausal women with
a type of breast cancer that is fueled by the hormone estrogen.
Women produce significantly less estrogen after menopause, but an
enzyme in fat still makes estrogen from other compounds.
Postmenopausal women with estrogen-driven breast cancer can take
medicine to stop that process, but those drugs are less effective
among the obese.
To see if there was a link between use of so-called non-steroidal
anti-inflammatory drugs, or NSAIDs, and the risk of breast cancer
returning, the researchers looked at data from 440 women treated in
Texas for estrogen-driven breast cancer between 1987 and 2011. Most
of the women were overweight or obese and had gone through
menopause.
NSAIDs - including aspirin, ibuprofen and naproxen - reduce
inflammation throughout the body.
About 6 percent of women who reported regular NSAID use had their
cancers return, compared to about 12 percent of those who didn’t
report regular NSAID use.
The cancers that did return among those who used NSAIDs also tended
to reappear later than the cancers of those who didn’t take NSAIDs,
the researchers found.
Using lab experiments and blood samples, the researchers then sought
to find an explanation for the link between regular NSAID use and
the risk of returning breast cancer among overweight women.
Compared to normal weight women, deGraffenried said the lab results
suggest that the bodies of overweight women are more hospitable
environments to estrogen-driven breast cancers and make it more
difficult for treatments to work.
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By reducing inflammation through the use of NSAIDs, the environment
within the bodies of obese women in which the cancer lives becomes
more like the environment of normal weight women.
“We are really truly starting to appreciate that it takes a village
to support a cancer growth,” deGraffenried said.
It’s too soon to tell obese women to start taking aspirin or other
NSAIDs to reduce the risk of their breast cancer from coming back,
she and another researcher said.
“What this study does is provide more evidence for the plausibility
of this,” Dr. Clifford Hudis, who was not involved with the new
study, told Reuters Health.
Hudis, chief of the Breast Cancer Medicine Service at Memorial Sloan
Kettering Cancer Center in New York City, said the new study had
some limitations.
“The women in this study were not randomly assigned to take or not
take the drug in question,” he said. “The doctor recommended it to
them or they chose to take it for some other reason. It wasn’t
assigned to them. It does not show and it’s far short of showing
causation.”
More reliable studies are being planned, deGraffenried said.
“These studies give promise but they’re still preliminary,” she
said.
SOURCE: http://bit.ly/1BjUomK
Cancer Research, online August 14, 2014.
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