[Following suggestion by one of the list owners, let us return to
some 'academic' threads;-)]
Good news from USA, eh? Breast cancer prevention study
stopped early because of benefits of tamoxifen. British doctors very
annoyed! Why? Allegedly the study was stopped early because of the
patent expiring on tamoxifen in a few years...oops, not academic
enough.
Anyway, how good is tamoxifem for prevention? These figures are
approximate and the assumptions equally approximate[;-)]:
c.7,000 women treated for c.7 years. 154 cancers in placebo group, 84
in tamoxifen group. So assuming 3,500 in each group what is the NNTT
(numbers needed to treat to prevent one cancer?) I'm not a
statistician[!], but if you need to treat 3,500 for 7 years to
prevent 70 cancers, you could argue that is 3,500 for 1 year to
prevent 10 cancers, or 350 for 1 year to prevent 1 cancer. Obviously
rubbish stats on my part.
I need more information. The public needs more information.
This type of media medical publication is crazy. For instance, some
have already asked about side-effects of tamoxifen eg endometrial
carcinoma. Another point of interest to me is, what is the prognosis
of those women who were on tamoxifen and still develop breast cancer?
Dr David J Plews
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