Hot Flash Newsflash III

Women of a certain age, as we like to say, find themselves prone to hot flashes—a sudden flush and drenching sweat. Not only are these episodes uncomfortable and potentially embarrassing, but they can also become a major distraction from any events at hand. Which is why they're not usually welcomed. However, a new study suggests that perhaps they should be in certain breast-cancer survivors—those taking the drug tamoxifen to ward off a cancer recurrence.

Joanne Mortimer of the Moores Cancer Center at the University of California, San Francisco School of Medicine led a study that followed 1,551 women. All had survived early-stage breast cancer and were taking part in a Women's Healthy Eating and Living study, which began in 1995. The study was designed to evaluate whether l0w-fat diets that were high in fiber, fruits, and vegetables might help limit the cancer's return. Slightly more than half of the recruits had been prescribed tamoxifen, and more than 75 percent of these women—674, to be exact—experienced hot flashes.

That's not surprising, since hot flashes are a common side effect of breast-cancer treatment, notes Mortimer. However, among tamoxifen users, hot flashes proved a strong predictor that a woman's cancer would not come back, Mortimer's team reported at the American Society of Clinical Oncology meeting, yesterday. Breast cancer returned in roughly 13 percent of the patients who'd experienced hot flashes, but in 21 percent of those who didn't.

These findings held for women at any age, and proved a better predictor of whether cancer would return than how advanced her cancer had been at diagnosis or whether the cancer was estrogen-receptor negative—the type most resistant to therapy with a synthetic hormone, such as tamoxifen.