• Think twice about skipping your daily tamoxifen: a new Scottish study showed that women who filled fewer than 70% of their tamoxifen prescriptions (10% of women in the study) had a 16% greater risk of dying than those who faithfully took their pill every day.

Over the years, tamoxifen has been a real superstar in the constellation of cancer-fighting drugs for postmenopausal women with ER-positive breast cancer. Though aromatase inhibitors are gradually replacing tamoxifen as the new drug of choice, their side effects are more immediately severe; 42% of women taking AIs report significant pain in either joints or muscles. And those bothersome side effects may make AIs even tougher to take, meaning a decade or so from now we may be reading that women who didn’t stay the course with AIs have had a higher mortality rate. “As we move toward the aromatase inhibitors… it might be even more important not to skip a couple of days,” noted Dr. Julie Gralow of the University of Washington in Seattle, who moderated the press conference at which the study information was released. No pain, no gain? Would that it weren’t so…