Tamoxifen and Breast Cancer by Michael W. DeGregorio and Valerie J. Wiebe, Yale University Press, pp 112, $22.50 hbk, £7.50/ $10 pbk
The global epidemic of breast cancer will claim the lives of 1 million women a year by the year 2000, say researchers. We badly need better drugs and new approaches to prevent this disease.
This need has provided the impetus for a raft of international trials in which the drug tamoxifen is being given to healthy women to see if it prevents breast cancer. Many thousands of woman are being recruited into the trials: the target figures are 16 000 in the US, 20 000 in Italy and 50 000 in an international trial coordinated in Britain, which has only recently begun to recruit women. But these initiatives have proved highly controversial.
Tamoxifen is a complex chemical that usually opposes, but sometimes mimics, the effect of the female ...
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