Eli Lilly's Osteoporosis Drug Also Lowers Rate of 'Bad' Cholesterol
May 13, 1998 9:41 AM
By Thomas M. Burton, Staff Reporter of The Wall
Street Journal
Eli Lilly & Co.'s estrogen-replacement therapy Evista,
which has been in the news for possibly preventing some
breast cancer, also lowers the rate of so-called bad
cholesterol in the bloodstreams of postmenopausal
women, a study has found.
The research, published in the Journal of the American
Medical Association this week, shows that the drug
lowers the LDL cholesterol rate by 12%. The scientists
who conducted the study, at Lilly and at leading
hospitals, also found Evista "favorably alters" other
components of blood chemistry that potentially relate to
cardiovascular risk. Evista didn't, however, alter the
levels of HDL cholesterol, which generally is considered
protective against cardiac disease.
Evista, generically called raloxifene, has only been
approved by the Food and Drug Administration as a
kind of estrogen-replacement therapy for the prevention
of osteoporosis. But the drug acts in numerous complex
ways in various organs of women's bodies, just as
estrogen itself does. In papers to be presented next
week at the American Society of Clinical Oncology,
scientists point out that they saw Evista substantially
lower the breast-cancer risk in women over 2 1/2 years.
It isn't known whether that lowered risk will continue
over more years.
The cardiac-related study, results of which Lilly
scientists have previously discussed but which haven't
previously been published, suggest Evista may also
protect against heart disease. However, Lilly is
sponsoring a five-year study designed to determine
whether the drug's effects on LDL cholesterol mean
Evista actually will ward off heart attacks.
Conventional estrogen-replacement therapy lowers LDL
cholesterol by about 14%, but it is associated with
possible increased risk of uterine and breast cancer,
which Evista isn't. In fact, Evista also is associated with a
decreased risk of uterine cancer in the studies to be
discussed next week at the oncology conference.
However, scientists involved in that research noted that
the numbers of women in the study who contracted
uterine cancer were small enough that those results may
not be statistically significant.
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