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INTRODUCTION Chemoprevention is the use of specific chemical compounds to prevent, inhibit or reverse carcinogenesis. Unlike chemotherapeutic agents, which are given for short periods of time to cancer patients with life-threatening diseases, chemopreventive agents are given for long periods to healthy subjects. Chemopreventive agents and must be completely safe. For practical reasons, chemopreventive drugs have been studied using surrogate endpoints such as sporadic adenomas or adenomas in patients with familial adenomatous polyposis (FAP). There is strong circumstantial evidence supporting the use of adenomas as surrogate endpoints, but the use of surrogates involves certain assumptions that may not be correct. For example, a treatment might have a favorable effect on a surrogate, but have no effect on cancer. Even worse, a treatment might decrease of colon cancer but have no effect on the surrogate. In this situation, the agent would be rejected based on the results of the surrogate study when, in fact, the agent was effective. CALCIUM Calcium has been shown in a large randomized trial to decrease the risk of recurrent colorectal adenomas by 19%. The Women’s Health Initiative, a large randomized trial (36,000 women) recently reported no benefit for calcium supplements to prevent colorectal cancer but the design and execution of the study make the importance of the findings uncertain.

Palabras clave: Colorectal cancer chemopreventive agents familial adenomatous polyposis (FAP).

2007-09-05   |   893 visitas   |   Evalua este artículo 0 valoraciones

Vol. 72 Núm.2. Agosto 2007 Pags. 133-134 Rev Gastroenterol Mex 2007; 72(Supl. 1)