STAR or the Study of Tamoxifen and Raloxifene showed that the drug raloxifene works well like tamoxifen in reducing breast cancer risk for postmenopausal women.
Raloxifene is an osteoporosis drug currently used to prevent and treat osteoporosis in postsmenopausal women that is also under a clinical trial for prostate cancer while tamoxifen is an oral selective estrogen receptor modulator which is used in breast cancer treatment that is currently the world's largest selling breast cancer treatment.
In STAR, both drugs reduced the risk of developing invasive breast cancer by about 50 percent. In addition, within the study, women who were prospectively and randomly assigned to take raloxifene daily, and who were followed for an average of about four years, had 36 percent fewer uterine cancers and 29 percent fewer blood clots than the women who were assigned to take tamoxifen. Uterine cancers, especially endometrial cancers, are a rare but serious side effect of tamoxifen. Both tamoxifen and raloxifene are known to increase a woman’s risk of blood clots.
STAR is one of the largest breast cancer prevention clinical trials ever conducted (enrolled 19,747 postmenopausal women who were at increased risk of the disease) which is coordinated by the National Surgical Adjuvant Breast and Bowel Project (NSABP), a network of cancer research professionals, and is sponsored by the National Cancer Institute (NCI), part of the National Institutes of Health.
Source: NIH News
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