"Those are cross-trial comparisons. I’m not sure I would go that far," retorted Dr. Goodwin, professor of medicine at the University of Toronto.
In a press conference announcing the IBIS-II results, Dr. Cuzick noted that neither tamoxifen nor raloxifene is widely utilized for primary prevention of breast cancer. More public education is in order, he added.
"I think there’s a lot to be done to model what the cardiologists have done: They’ve convinced people that high cholesterol and high blood pressure are actually diseases. In fact, they’re only risk factors, but by taking drugs to reduce those risk factors there’s been a major effect. We need to make people aware there are effective ways of reducing the risk of breast cancer by more than 50%. The toxicities are limited, and if you have toxicity you simply stop treatment," he said.
The IBIS-II study was funded by Cancer Research U.K., the National Health and Medical Research Council of Australia, AstraZeneca, and Sanofi-Aventis. Dr. Cuzick is on the speaker’s bureau for AstraZeneca.
Simultaneous with Dr. Cuzick’s presentation in San Antonio, the IBIS-II results were published online in the Lancet (2013 Dec. 12 [doi:10.1016/S0140-6736(13)62292-8]).