Estrogen: A surprise treatment for metastatic breast cancer

This report reminds me how important it is to cycle treatments for all conditions, because the disease and body adapts over time to whatever intervention we use. In herbal medicine it is a rule that we advise either stopping the use of an intervention periodically, to restore the response to the treatment, or changing the treatment until the new treatment is also defeated by the disease.

One of the reasons I maintain a serious, persistent interest in alternative care is that I believe we need greatest the multiplicity of treatments we can find, so that people don't run out of options for treatment. Even treatments that do not offer cure, but may delay disease progression, are very valuable, especially since alternative care tends to be low tech and far less expensive than customary medical care. If later more curative measures can be restored to efficacy then there is a distinct value to a product.

Usually the more flexible and adaptive the approach, the greater the overall success of the treatment. Sometimes "success" is defined by improved quality of life, as this report of beneficial use of estrogen to restore estrogen sensitivity in metastatic breast cancer demonstrates.

Certainly makes you wonder about estrogen and how it can affect cancer tumor growth.  My first diagnosis I was ER/PR+ and was treated with lumpectomy, radiation and 5 years on Tamoxifen.  After that time I tried one of the AI's (can't remember which one) for a couple months but had a lot of pain, so didn't continue with it.  I already had pretty severe degenerative arthritis pain and my oncologist  said that after the 5 years on Tamoxifen, it wasn't proven that an AI would add any further or much increased benefit.  I think they were pretty new then.  Anyway, 3 1/2 years later, this past summer, I had a local recurrence  - same exact spot as original tumor, but this time it switched to ER/PR-.  So that left me wondering when the estrogen receptor changed - while I was still taking Tamoxifen or afterwards and what made it change?

I think its important to keep in mind exactly the group of women that this phenomena occured it.  These were women who had metastatic breast cancer, treated for a long time by AI's, whose cancer had then stopped responding positively to the AI's low estrogen environment.  And of those, 1/3 responded favorably (either tumor regression or no further growth) to the estrogen treatment for a (short?) period of time, after which AI's were then tried again.  This isn't general advice for ER+ breast cancer patients.