Osteoporosis Treatment Update

Bisphosphonates not associated with increased risk of cancer of the esophagus or stomach.
Bloomberg News (8/11, Doherty) reports, "A group of medicines widely used to prevent bone loss doesn't increase the risk of cancer of the esophagus or stomach." In fact, the "combined incidence of the two tumor types was the same for osteoporosis patients given the drugs, called bisphosphonates, as for those not treated with the medicines," according to a paper in the New England Journal of Medicine. "Duration of treatment didn't have an impact on the risk of either cancer."
The study "comes out about a year and a half after the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) reported 23 cases of esophageal cancer between 1995 and 2008 in patients using alendronate and another 31 cases in patients using a variety of bisphosphonates in Europe and Japan," Medscape (8/10, Mulcahy) reported. So, the current study "authors took up the challenge of investigating the possible link between these cancers and oral bisphosphonates, the use of which has 'dramatically' increased in recent years in the Western world." Specifically, they analyzed analyze data on "more than 80,000" UK "patients, who were mostly women and had a mean age of 70 years."
During an "average follow-up of about 4.5 years, there were 37 cases of stomach cancer and 79 cases of esophageal cancer diagnosed in the bisphosphonate group, compared with 43 cases of stomach cancer and 72 cases of esophageal cancer after 4.4 years in the control group," HealthDay (8/10, Preidt) reported. Thus, the Belfast-based team concluded, "these drugs should not be withheld, on the basis of possible esophageal cancer risk, from patients with a genuine clinical indication for their use."