For postmenopausal women who have been treated for breast cancer, five is a magic number. The standard therapy for tackling the majority of their tumors is surgery to remove the lumps, then the drug tamoxifen for five years to prevent cancer from recurring. After five years, the body becomes resistant to tamoxifen's effects. At that point, women stop taking it, cross their fingers and hope for the best. "There wasn't really anything available for them," explains Dr. Andrew von Eschenbach, director of the National Cancer Institute. "Yet we knew that many women risk recurrences even beyond five years."
Last week researchers...
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