Breast Cancer Breakthrough

Good news for women: A large government sponsored study of nearly 20,000 postmenopausal women found that raloxifene (marketed under the name of Evista) reduces their chance of developing breast cancer as effectively as tamoxifen, the only drug previously shown to reduce the risk, but is less likely to cause serious side effects such as uterine cancer and blood clots.

Because an estimated 500,000 women use raloxifene to reduce the risk of osteoporosis, many will be more comfortable using it for breast cancer protection, several experts predicted.

"It's terrific," said Susan Love, a breast cancer expert at the University of California at Los Angeles. "This gives us another drug that we can use to prevent breast cancer that is less risky than the only other drug we had."

Several experts, however, urged caution, saying that the advantage of raloxifene remains unclear and that more research is needed to prove the drug reduced the overall risk over longer periods.