Advances in Women's Health and Oncology - Ep 193

Some of your own work is represented in the themed issue, specifically related to cardiovascular outcomes of these exceedingly popular GLP-1 receptor agonists and when used during the treatment of breast cancer.

Will you summarize some of the key issues you'd like people to be aware of?

Yeah, I think this is a really exciting field.

I was very honored to be able to work with some of my colleagues here at the College of Pharmacy who were interested in looking at these agents, these newer agents, the GLP-1 drugs that it seems like everybody and their mother are taking these drugs now, either for weight loss or for diabetes.

Obviously, we've seen a huge uptick in patients that are on these medications.

So the question has always been, what do we do with them? If there's no inherent drug interactions, I think, for the most part, we go ahead and try and proceed to allow patients to continue these therapies.

Some of our oncologists are pretty heavy sometimes because they are associated.

They do have some associated GI side effects.

So we're going to give them chemotherapy drugs that can be aggravated by that, aggravate those side effects.

so there's still a lot of unknown i think in terms of what the oncology community feels in general about these drugs but i think that the really exciting part is there is emerging data just like what we published in the themed issue that there may be some beneficial effects of these drugs in terms of cancer outcomes, in terms of overall survival.

And obviously, we all know they have cardioprotective effects in a non-cancer patient, but now it looks like, based on the work that we did and some other investigators that have also published, there may actually be some cardioprotective effects in cancer patients as well.

So that's pretty exciting.

Obviously, it's still early.

Most, if not all, of the studies are observational studies, so we really don't know what the effect of potential confounding factors are with those studies.

But I think the early data looks very promising, and I think we'll continue to see more emerge in terms of what the associated drugs have on carotid toxic side effects from chemotherapy or other effects as well.

It would be great if they have some anti-cancer effects.

I don't know that we know that at this point, but certainly they have some other amazing properties that seem to be emerging and we're finding more out about.

Well, it seems to me that one potential problem is that oncology agents are probably prescribed almost exclusively by clinicians, prescribers who are familiar with the drugs and work in the field of oncology.

Whereas the GLP-1 receptor agonists and related compounds can be prescribed by a variety of different medical practitioners and associated prescribers.

So probably more observational studies in the future.