But some say the risks outweigh the benefits for women who are seeking a way to prevent cancer in the first place. It's very hard to make a blanket statement like the risk of taking Tamoxifen outweighs the risk of the side effects of the drug. We have twenty years of history in knowing what the drug does. Diane Blum of Cancer Care, a survivors' group in Chicago, agrees. Unfortunately, there's been a lot of attention on the risks of Tamoxifen, which are serious but rare.
All drugs have side effects.
Nothing is totally without problems. Carver estimates that 10 percent of the total number of prescriptions written for Tamoxifen are for the purpose of risk reduction. Tamoxifen might be just the beginning of a new crop of cancer-prevention drugs. NCI is currently comparing Tamoxifen and another drug that was originally created to treat osteoporosis, Raloxifine, in a large study called the STAR trial. Researchers say the study will tell us just how effective both drugs are preventing breast cancer, but in order to do this researchers must recruit 22,000 high-risk women to take either drug for five years.