Hormone test predicts ovarian function after chemotherapy for breast cancer

ScienceDaily (June 5, 2011) — A test that shows how many eggs a woman has in her ovaries may help young women with breast cancer know what their reproductive function will be after chemotherapy, a new study finds.

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The results are being presented at The Endocrine Society's 93rd Annual Meeting in Boston.

Called the anti-Mullerian hormone (AMH) test, this blood test measures levels of an ovarian hormone that reflects the size of the ovarian reserve, or remaining egg supply. Currently, doctors use it to quantify a woman's ovarian reserve before in vitro fertilization treatments. Now researchers from Scotland have found that measurement of AMH indicates how likely it will be for a woman to still have eggs in her ovaries after chemotherapy, which can often damage a woman's eggs and cause infertility.

"Future reproductive function is a concern for many young women with cancer," said lead investigator Richard Anderson, MD, PhD, professor of clinical reproductive science at the University of Edinburgh. "This test will be of benefit to women with newly diagnosed cancer to help decide whether they need to take steps to preserve their fertility."

In the U.S. alone, breast cancer is diagnosed in more than 25,000 women younger than 45 each year, according to the American Cancer Society.

For this study, Anderson and his colleagues recruited 50 premenopausal women, ages 29 to 51, who had just received a diagnosis of early breast cancer. All women had normal menstrual cycles and were asked to keep a daily record of their menstrual cycle, as an index of ovarian activity, during the two years of the study. Before the women started chemotherapy, they gave blood samples for AMH testing. They again had AMH tests one and two years after starting treatment.

Before chemotherapy the median AMH level was 0.4 nanograms per milliliter (ng/mL). After cancer treatment the AMH level fell rapidly, becoming undetectable (below 0.16 ng/mL) in 68 percent of the women after one cycle of chemotherapy, the authors reported. By one-year follow-up, 11 women withdrew from the study, mostly because of cancer recurrence, Anderson said. Menstrual records were available for 39 women at one year and for 29 women at two years.

A low AMH measurement before treatment correlated well with amenorrhea, or absence of menstruation, after treatment. Women whose AMH before treatment was low (below 0.4 ng/mL) were 16 times likelier to have stopped menstruating after chemotherapy than women with a high pretreatment AMH value, Anderson said. The odds of losing ovarian function remained higher even after statistical analysis controlled for increasing age, which tends to lower AMH levels. Women whose AMH before chemotherapy exceeded 0.92 ng/mL were reportedly almost five times more likely to continue menstruating after treatment.

"Our data suggest that the AMH test, taken before cancer treatment, can help individualize a woman's infertility risk after chemotherapy for breast cancer," Anderson said.

He added that results of this study, which was funded by the U.K. Medical Research Council, are likely to apply to other types of cancer as well.

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Radiation after prostate removal is cost-effective, but less likely to be recommended by urologists

ScienceDaily (June 9, 2011) — Receiving radiation therapy immediately after a radical prostatectomy is a cost-effective treatment for prostate cancer patients when compared with waiting and acting on elevated prostate-specific antigen (PSA) levels, according to a new study by researchers at Thomas Jefferson University and Hospital.

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What's more, a separate, but related study, found that urologists were less likely than radiation oncologists to recommend adjuvant radiation therapy or to believe it improves overall survival.

There has been question over whether administering adjuvant radiation therapy after removing the prostate is an appropriate course of action because of associated toxicities, risk of overtreatment and costs, even with data supporting its benefits to overall survival, but a new decision analysis published online in the Annals of Oncology on June 9 found that the procedure is a practical option for patients.

"This work demonstrates that adjuvant radiation therapy is a cost-effective strategy for selected patients after prostatectomy," said Laura Pizzi, PharmD, associate professor at the Jefferson School of Pharmacy, and senior author of the study. "It is typical for cancer treatments to provide clinical benefit at a cost; however, the cost per success that we reported for adjuvant radiation therapy is on the low end when one broadly considers the cost per success reported for other cancer treatments."

The objective of the study was to construct a decision analytic model to estimate the real world cost of adjuvant radiation therapy versus observation from the payers' perspective, using peer-reviewed, published data from a Southwest Oncology Group prospective, randomized trial. Side effects, overtreatment and the price tag were taken into account.

Nearly one-third of newly diagnosed men with prostate cancer -- almost 220,000 men were diagnosed in 2010 -- undergo radical prostatectomy. Previous studies have shown that adjuvant radiation therapy improves biochemical progression-free survival and overall survival for these patients; however, most do not receive the treatment.

"Despite being shown to be effective, less than 20 percent of qualifying patients receive it," said Timothy Showalter, M.D., assistant professor of Radiation Oncology at Thomas Jefferson University, associate research member of the Kimmel Cancer Center at Jefferson, and lead author of the study. "Although not all patients will benefit from adjuvant radiation therapy, the level of utilization is lower than expected based on the positive, published results of randomized clinical trials."

"Studies like this one are an important step toward establishing the value of this treatment and suggest that adjuvant radiation therapy should have a role in the treatment of selected patients. Our group has embarked on a large-scale research program to evaluate and improve treatments after prostatectomy for patients with high-risk prostate cancer, and these studies are critical foundational accomplishments," he added.

Side effects, risk of overtreatment (the subset of patients who may not have failed PSA tests after radiation therapy despite adverse pathologic factors) and the high price have cast some doubts for patients and physicians alike. In many cases, physicians choose to observe patients closely with serial PSA tests and offer radiation therapy only as a salvage treatment after a rise in the PSA levels.

But this new analysis, Dr. Showalter says, "substantiates the benefit of adjuvant radiation therapy," taking these factors into consideration, including toxicity and overtreatment.

Another study by Dr. Showalter and colleagues, published online in the International Journal of Radiation Oncology