Chicago- Blood samples from women for whom breast cancer has come back had high levels of estrogen although most of them had been treated with estrogen blocking drugs, U.S. researchers reported.

The researchers said that the finding recommends women with a history of breast cancer to take extra steps like that of weight management and regular exercise in order to lessen their estrogen levels and reduce the risk of the cancer’s return.

Estrogen has been highly linked with the development of many breast cancers. However, very few researches have examined at the connection between high estrogen levels and cancer recurrence, particularly in women who are treated with anti estrogen drugs such as tamoxifen.

“This study is the largest to date and it is the only study to include women taking drugs like tamoxifen in order to reduce the effect of estrogen on cancer growth,” reported Cheryl Rock, a professor at the University of California, San Diego.

Cheryl Rock, who led the study, which was published in the journal Cancer Epidemiology, Biomarkers and Prevention said, “Taking anti estrogen drugs such as tamoxifen will not totally remove the hormone’s effect in women with greater levels of estrogen”.

Tamoxifen changed breast cancer treatment when it was proven to decrease the risk of the cancer’s return by about fifty percent.

But Rock said that women should consider few basic preventive measures apart from tamoxifen and the newer aromatase inhibitors.Rock and her colleagues derived their conclusions from a dietary intervention trial, which tracked 3,088 women who had earlier been treated for initial stage breast cancer but were free of cancer at the time they joined.

They found out 153 women from the study for whom cancer had reoccurred and matched them up with the same number of women who were cancer-free after 7 years. Women were matched up based on age, type, ethnicity, body size, use of chemotherapy etc.
Around 2/3rd of the women had been taking the drug, tamoxifen and about 78 % of them had estrogen receptor positive cancers i.e. tumors which require estrogen to grow.

When the researchers examined the blood taken from the women at the beginning of the trial, the researchers identified that, women in whom cancer had returned the concentration of estrogen was more than double when compared with those who were cancer-free.

“We are doing researches now to find out whether heavier women have greater risk for recurrence,” Cheryl Rock said.

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