Nearly 300,000 women to be offered drug which can cut risk of breast cancer in half

Almost 300,000 women are to be offered a drug to reduce their risk of developing breast cancer, the NHS has announced.

Scientists have found that the hormone therapy - called anastrozole - can prevent women from developing breast cancer and that the protective effect lasts for years after a woman has stopped taking the drug.

Some 289,000 post-menopausal women in England who are considered to have a moderate or high risk of breast cancer will be offered the drug in a bid to reduce the risk of developing the disease.

Trials have shown that the drug reduces breast cancer cases by 49 per cent over 11 years among eligible women, meaning that if just 25 per cent of eligible women in England take up the offer – and half of those take the drug for the recommended five years – then 2,000 cases will be prevented.

It has previously been used to treat breast cancer but has been “repurposed” to also prevent cases. It is the first drug to go through NHS England’s Medicines Repurposing Programme.

Anastrozole was first recommended as a preventive option by the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (Nice) in 2017, however, with the treatment being unlicensed in this use, uptake has remained low.

Now the drug has been licensed by the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency as a preventive option as well.

NHS chief executive Amanda Pritchard said: “It’s fantastic that this vital risk-reducing option could now help thousands of women and their families avoid the distress of a breast cancer diagnosis.

“Allowing more women to live healthier lives, free of breast cancer is truly remarkable, and we hope that licensing anastrozole for a new use today represents the first step to ensuring this risk-reducing option can be accessed by all who could benefit from it.

“This is the first drug to be repurposed though a world-leading new programme to help us realise the full potential of existing medicines in new uses to save and improve more lives on the NHS.

“Thanks to this initiative, we hope that greater access to anastrozole could enable more women to take risk-reducing steps if they’d like to, helping them live without fear of breast cancer.”

The moves adds to the NHS’s armoury of preventative breast cancer medication, with tamoxifen and raloxifene already licenced to prevent breast cancer.

The treatment is taken as a 1mg tablet, once a day for five years and works by cutting down the amount of the hormone oestrogen that a patient’s body makes by blocking an enzyme called aromatase.

The most common side effects of the medicine are hot flushes, feeling weak, pain/stiffness in the joints, arthritis, skin rash, nausea, headache, osteoporosis, and depression.

Baroness Delyth Morgan, chief executive at the charity Breast Cancer Now, said: “The extension of anastrozole’s licence to cover it being used as a risk-reducing treatment is a major step forward that will enable more eligible women with a significant family history of breast cancer to reduce their chance of developing the disease.”

Health Minister Will Quince said: “Breast cancer is the most common cancer in the UK so I’m delighted that another effective drug to help to prevent this cruel disease has now been approved.

“We’ve already seen the positive effect anastrozole can have in treating the disease when it has been detected in post-menopausal women and now we can use it to stop it developing at all in some women.”