Source: BBC Health; European Breast Cancer Conference, Barcelona
As it sometimes happens in medicine, a drug that has been proven to work in less than stellar ways for a given condition may have a completely unintended but surprisingly beneficial medical outcome. What the heck am I talking about? Some examples may be in order here. You may have heard of a drug called Imitrex, used for the treatment of migraines. Well it was originally formulated as an anti-seizure drug with mixed results. A few accidental results and a new generation of migraine treatments was born.
Not familiar with that one? Okay, you may have heard of a drug called Viagra which is fairly well-knonw (to the internet spam community in particular). Well, Viagra, was an anti-hypertensive drug which despite years of development and testing did less for hypertension than it did for…well, you get the idea.
Enter beta blockers, a classification of blood pressure medications estimated to be currently prescribed to over two million people in the UK alone. A team of UK and German researchers has found that in a study of women with breast cancer tumors, those taking beta blockers had a 71% lower chance of dying from metastatic (spreading) disease.
Granted the study was small, focusing upon some 466 European women with breast cancer. However, the results could be significant. Breast cancer remains the single largest killer of women, with some 30,000 diagnosed in the UK each year. It is thought that beta blockers may also block hormones which trigger the spread of cancer cells beyond the breast. The chances of curing breast cancer differ remarkably where cancer can be confined to the breast or to a small area of the breast. Once cancer metastasizes (spreads) throughout the body, chances of a cure diminish.
Beta blockers attach to the same cancer cell receptors as metastatic associated hormones, thereby reducing the ability of the cancer cells to spread beyond the confines of a tumor. So it may just be that the hope for a “new” drug to treat breast cancer exists in an old drug, beta blockers, which have been used for years now with relative safety. It is hoped that a combination of existing chemotherapy drugs and beta blockers may offer breast cancer patients greater chance of cure and certainly greater chance of confining, and thereby surviving, breast cancer.
The even better news? Unlike the introduction of a completely new drug, the re-purposing (If I may) of a drug isn’t as rigorous a process and it appears that the studies are well into the clinical trial stages. Granted this is taking place in Europe and our FDA may not be as enlightened. However, this also means that it might not take another 7 years for beta blockers to emerge as accepted treatment for breast cancer.
~Posted by D.M. Schwadron, Esquire