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JNCI Journal of the National Cancer Institute 2005 97(6):412-413; doi:10.1093/jnci/97.6.412
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© 2005 Oxford University Press

NEWS

Tamoxifen Pharmacogenetics Moves Closer to Reality

Ken Garber

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.

Occasionally, one patient changes medicine. In 1998, a 45-year-old woman with breast cancer walked into a clinic at Georgetown University's Lombardi Cancer Center in Washington, D.C. Like many patients taking the anti-estrogen drug tamoxifen, she was suffering from severe hot flashes and was desperate for help. On a hunch, her doctor put her on the antidepressant paroxetine (Paxil), and the hot flashes disappeared almost completely within a few days.

"It was like the silver bullet," said pharmacologist David Flockhart, M.D., Ph.D., now at Indiana University. "Far, far too fast for any ... psychiatric effect of that drug to have worked." Her response to the drug left researchers wondering, is it possible that paroxetine cured this patient's hot flashes overnight?


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  		David Flockhart

 
That question led to a fruitful line of research reaching far beyond hot flashes—research that may eventually help breast cancer patients live longer. Flockhart knew that paroxetine was . . . [Full Text of this Article]

A Tamoxifen Response Gene?

Arrival of the Aromatase Inhibitors


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