These chemo patients took an anti-nausea pill. It may have saved their lives

It’s a common anti-nausea drug offered to thousands during chemotherapy. But when a Melbourne team took a closer look at breast cancer patient records, a “surprising” pattern emerged.

A common, anti-nausea drug offered to chemotherapy patients during treatment may help fight cancer.

A common, anti-nausea drug offered to chemotherapy patients during treatment may help fight cancer and have unintentionally saved people’s lives.

“Surprising” Monash University research shows early-stage breast cancer patients given aprepitant for chemotherapy-induced nausea actually had higher long-term survival rates.

The benefit was even larger for women with triple-negative breast cancer, an aggressive, difficult-to-treat form of the disease.

The team behind the study cautioned more research was needed to confirm the link but said it was an “exciting” finding and should be “urgently” evaluated.

Their analysis of records from more than 13,000 Norwegian breast cancer patients – half of whom took aprepitant – found women’s ten year risk of death was 17 per cent lower if they were prescribed the drug.

The risk of their cancer returning also dropped by 11 per cent.

In women with triple-negative breast cancer, the risk of death was reduced by up to 39 per cent and the risk of cancer recurrence up to 31 per cent.

Monash Institute of Pharmaceutical Sciences Dr Aeson Changsaid this was the first observational study to uncover this pattern and the women had only been given the drug to treat the nausea side effect of their chemotherapy.

Surprising research found that breast cancer patients who took the anti-nausea medicaton had longer-term survival rates.

“We’re actually quite surprised to see quite a strong association in women with triple negative breast cancer,” he said.

He said they suspect an interaction between the chemotherapy and the anti-nausea drug may be responsible for the results.

“To be honest, we are still trying to understand how chemotherapy is interacting with this drug,” he said.

He said they did not observe the same benefits with other anti-nausea medication.

“Interestingly what we found is such survival benefits were unique to aprepitant because we did not find the same association of use of other anti-nausea medications … to either survival or cancer recurrence,” he said.

He said they hoped to secure funding for further research, including whether taking aprepitant for longer than the standard three day course could improve survival even more.

“If we’re able to understand the mechanism of why such particular anti-nausea medication would interact with chemotherapy, we might be able to uncover new clinically safe and easily translatable options to treat breast cancer like triple negative breast cancer.”

The study, published in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute, was a joint project with the Norwegian Institute of Public Health.

The institute’s Dr Edoardo Botteri said they could also investigate whether the findings may apply to other types of cancer.

“Since this is the first observational study, further observational studies and clinical trials are required to confirm our findings in breast cancer and likely in other cancer types,” Dr Botteri said.

Co-senior author Monash University Professor Erica Sloan said further studies were “urgently needed” to evaluate their findings and “potentially” inform new treatment guidelines “down the track”.