One of my favorite bloggers has been on hiatus since July 3, in Southeast Asia researching avian flu, but last week when I wasn't paying attention he came back and started kicking BigPharma around again.
This guy is even more cynical about drug companies than I am. Here's what he had to say about an industry award given to Astrazeneca for their breast cancer drug Arimidex:
The press release rehashes all the hype from the ATAC trial which made anastrazole look so much better than tamoxifen for early breast cancer: 47% reductions in recurrence and so on. 47% sounds impressive - but 47% of what? Do women with succesfully treated early breast cancer have a high rate of recurrence? I don't know. And when you look at the absolute risk redctions they are more in the order of 2%, and there was no improvement in survival among women taking anastrazole. We don't know what the long term effects of these drugs are and its highly likely that women who do take them will get osteoporosis because of their anti-oestrogen effects in this predominantly postmenopausal group of women. So you will also have to take a bisphosphonate as a well. Anastrazole sounds like a pharmaceutical company's dream drug. No wonder it won an award.
Welcome back PharmaWatch!
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