Mayo Clinic researchers and their international colleagues have discovered genetic variants that lead to severe arthritis for a subset of women when taking aromatase inhibitors to treat their breast cancer. This serious side effect is so painful that many women halt their lifesaving medication. The findings appear today in the online issue of the Journal of Clinical Oncology.
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This is one more instance where pharmacogenomics is helping inform medicine on how best to treat individuals. In this case an international team helped in the analysis of hundreds of women’s genomes — called a genome-wide association study — to find a handful of variants in their genes that make some women react differently to a standard medication for breast cancer. An accompanying editorial described the study as “a new pharmacogenomic paradigm in breast cancer.”
