Beta Blockers May Also Help Lung Cancer Patients Live Longer

Beta Blockers May Also Help Lung Cancer Patients Live Longer.
New analysis suggests that beta blockers, medications that are hand-me-down to control blood persuasion and heart rhythms, may also help lung cancer patients live longer. The researchers found that patients with non-small-cell lung cancer being treated with dispersal lived 22 percent longer if they were also taking these drugs. "These findings were the first, to our knowledge, demonstrating a survival further associated with the use of beta blockers and diffusion therapy for lung cancer," said lead researcher Dr Daniel Gomez, an helper professor in the department of radiation oncology at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston.

So "The results mean that there may be another mechanism, largely unexplored, that could potentially demote the rates of tumor spread in patients with this very aggressive disease". The piece was published Jan 9, 2013 in the Annals of Oncology. For the study, Gomez's rig compared the outcomes of more than 700 patients undergoing radiation therapy for lung cancer.

The investigators found that the 155 patients taking beta blockers for tenderness problems lived an average of almost two years, compared with an middling of 18,6 months for patients not taking these drugs. The findings held even after adjusting for other factors such as age, station of the disease, whether or not chemotherapy was given at the same time, presence of chronic obstructive pulmonary illness and aspirin use, the researchers noted. Beta blockers also improved survival without the disease spreading to other parts of the body and survival without the c murrain recurring.

Beta blockers, however, made no difference in the length of survival without the affliction progressing in the part of the lungs where it started, the study authors pointed out. How beta blockers might loth cancer's spread isn't known. However, the researchers wager that these drugs may work by suppressing a hormone called norepinephrine, which is known to promote the spread of cancer cells.

So "Right now, we would not exponent that patients take beta blockers for this purpose, until these findings can be validated by pending trials. In addition, future studies will help us to understand if the means that we propose is correct, and thus if beta blockers are indeed directly affecting the aggressiveness of this cancer or if these findings are due to the activation or blockage of another pathway".

For one expert, the study raises more questions than it answers. "It is unclear whether beta blockers insufficiency to be started before the cancer is found, or if they still have a utility once the diagnosis is made," said Dr Len Horovitz, a pulmonologist at Lenox Hill Hospital in New York City. In addition, Horovitz wonders whether other drugs that balk hormones might gratify the same purpose.

One opportunity is clear, however. People should not start taking beta blockers in hopes of preventing or controlling lung cancer. Horovitz did believe he thinks trials testing whether or not beta blockers or other hormone-blocking drugs obstruct the spread of lung cancer should be done capsule. Although the study found a link between beta blocker use in patients undergoing emission therapy and increased non-small-cell lung cancer survival, it did not try cause-and-effect.