Hypercalcemia, a complication of hormone therapy of advanced breast cancer.

Steroid hormones and castration have been suc cessfully employed in the palliative treatment of advanced mammary cancer (3, 8, 9,12,16,17, 24, 29-31, 35).* Complications may arise during this therapy, however, which necessitate special con sideration; one of the more serious of these is hypercalcemia. The progressive advanced stages of the syndrome are manifested by anorexia, nausea, vomiting, apathy, weakness, drowsiness sometimes merging into disorientation, stupor or coma, vascular collapse, and in some instances, death (1, 2, 9, 13, 18-22, 32, 34). Associated with these symptoms are an elevation of the serum and urinary calcium, frequently electrolyte changes, and sometimes renal insufficiency. The present report records the changes observed in nine patients with obvious hypercalcemia culled from a series of 361 women with advanced cancer of the breast who were treated with sex steroid hormones. The complication in this series occurred only in patients with osseous involvement. Eightyfour of 253 patients treated with estrogens and 97 of 108 treated with androgenic hormones demonstrated osseous métastases.Of these, seven patients treated with androgens and two patients treated with estrogens developed profound mani festations of the hypercalcemia syndrome. Two patients with hypercalcemia, not included in the