The adjuvant treatment of women with endocrine-sensitive early breast cancer has been dominated for the last 40 years by tamoxifen. However, the side-effects associated with this therapy have prompted a search for safer and biochemically more selective endocrine agents and led to the development of the third-generation aromatase inhibitors (AIs) anastrozole, letrozole and exemestane. Promising ...

Background: Everolimus/exemestane has been shown to improve progression-free survival in patients with endocrine-resistant metastatic breast cancer. The regimen well-accepted despite lack of benefit. In real-life setting, were not well-selected and hence benefit such treatment may be as robust. Method: This is a retrospective review 143 hormone receptor (HR) positive, HER-2 negative MBC who pro...

Purpose: Lung adenocarcinomas amongnever-smokers aremore common in females than inmales. This implies that gender-dependent hormones promote smoking unrelated lung adenocarcinoma. We therefore investigated mRNA expression of aromatase, an intrinsic estrogen synthetase, in lung adenocarcinoma and assessed its correlation to clinicopathologic factors, including EGFRmutations and postsurgical prog...

Naturally occurring depsidones from the marine fungus Aspergillus unguis are known to have substantial anti-cancer activity, but their mechanism of action remains elusive. The purpose of this study was to examine the anti-aromatase activity of two common depsidones, unguinol and aspergillusidone A, in a co-culture system of human primary breast adipose fibroblasts and hormonal responsive T47D b...

BACKGROUND Microbial transformation of steroids has been extensively used for the synthesis of steroidal drugs, that often yield novel analogues, not easy to obtain by chemical synthesis. We report here fungal transformation of a synthetic steroidal drug, exemestane, used for the treatment of breast cancer and function through inhibition of aromatase enzyme. RESULTS Microbial transformation o...

To the Editor: We have read with great interest the recently published article by Gerber et al. (1) on the potential endometrial benefit of anastrozole given to postmenopausal breast cancer patients with tamoxifen-induced endometrial pathology. Their study showed that the switch to anastrozole significantly reduced the need for a second invasive gynecologic procedure for recurrent vaginal bleed...

Third-generation aromatase inhibitors and inactivators have been successfully implemented in therapy of metastatic breast cancer, and three large phase III trials have revealed superiority compared with tamoxifen monotherapy in the adjuvant setting. Notably, each of these trials recorded a substantial reduction in contralateral breast cancer among patients exposed to the aromatase inhibitor/ina...

BACKGROUND Endometrial stromal sarcomas (ESSs) are rare, indolent tumors with high recurrence rates. Management includes surgery and hormonal therapy given high estrogen and progesterone receptor (ER/PR) expression. CASE A pre-menopausal patient with stage II ESSs (ER +/PR +) underwent primary surgery followed by adjuvant megestrol. Recurrence in the bladder/upper vagina (ER +/PR -) was diagn...