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| |  DG DISPATCH - ANA: Possible Link Found Between Tamoxifen, Memory Loss By Edward Susman Special to DG News SEATTLE, WA -- October 15, 1999 -- A new study hints that women who are taking tamoxifen (sold under the trade name Nolvadex(R) by Zeneca Pharmaceuticals) for the treatment of breast cancer may suffer some loss of memory and other mental aberrations when compared to women who were former users of the anti-estrogen drug.
Curiously, in several of the mental tests performed in the study, the current users of tamoxifen did better than women with breast cancer who never took tamoxifen. Annlia Paganini-Hill, PhD, professor of preventive medicine at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles, said physicians should consider the study results when thinking about putting women on long-term tamoxifen for prevention of breast cancer. She said the benefits of tamoxifen for women with breast cancer would outweigh any of the mental changes she noted in her study. The study was funded by Wyeth-Ayerst. None of the patients in the study were on raloxifene, Paganini-Hill said at the 124th annual meeting of the American Neurological Association in Seattle. In the study, questionnaires were returned by 1,295 women who were participating in the Los Angeles County Breast Cancer Study. Overall, the 790 women who had ever used tamoxifen did as well on the tests as the 505 women who had never taken the drug. Current users did not perform as well as past users. Dr. Nicholas Vick, MD, professor of neurology at Northwestern University, said Paganini-Hill’s study was "potentially very important because of the large number of women taking tamoxifen." However, he said he never saw the emergence of mental problems among women taking high dose tamoxifen in brain cancer trials he conducted.
Related Link: Tamoxifen and Wyeth-Ayerst.
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