If this is not your name, click here. Other Ophthalmic Surgery Organ Transplantation Orthopaedics Other Osteoarthritis Osteoporosis Otitis Otorhino. Drugs developed to prevent and treat osteoporosis are being used to fight an even deadlier bone disease, that of bone tumors which originate from breast cancer. Cancers which reach advanced stages can spin off colonies of tumor cells called metastases, which set up new tumors in other parts of the body. Metastases from cancers that originate in the breast tend to settle into the bones.
Bone metastases can cause debilitating pain and severe fractures.
It is not unusual for a person with advanced cancer to die from these metastatic tumors rather than from the original tumor. Enter the bisphosphonates, a relatively new class of drugs developed to prevent the breakdown of bone cells in osteoporosis. In just the past few years, cancer researchers have found that treatment with bisphosphonates will also prevent the destruction of bone by cancer metastases and even cause those metastatic tumors to shrink. The latest finding is that bisphosphonates may stop bone metastases from developing at all. At the 22nd Annual San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium, in San Antonio, TX, Ingo Diel, MD, Assistant Professor of Medicine, University of Heidelberg, Germany, summarized the evidence in favor of giving bisphosphonates to women with breast cancer who have a high risk of advancing cancer.