Hormone Replacement Therapy v... Video Transcript

Webcast Transcript

For patients with advanced breast cancer, when the cancer has already spread, that's not curable. But in some cases, hormonal therapy can keep it in check and sometimes for a very long time.

ANNOUNCER: An exciting aspect of hormonal treatment on the horizon is that its use might even prevent breast cancer in certain situations.

DEBU TRIPATHY, MD: The use of preventive tamoxifen, that is, in someone who does not have cancer and who's never had cancer, is used in women that we consider to be at high risk. And the kinds of things that we use to define it would be women who have had a biopsy that was benign, but showed some changes that we know predispose people and that entity is called hyperplasia. People that have atypical hyperplasia, which is a type of hyperplasia, we feel might benefit from tamoxifen in this setting. Other women might be those that have a family history, that started their periods earlier, those are also slight risk factors.

ANNOUNCER: So what's in a name? In this case, everything. Two similar phrases that need to be thought of in very different ways.

DEBU TRIPATHY, MD: My technique to clarify between hormone treatment and hormone replacement is to really explain the biology to the patients. That some breast cancers respond to lowering the effect of estrogen. So we want to use hormone treatments that in fact accomplish that. For women who are having menopausal symptoms, hormone replacement really is trying to replace the estrogen.

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