I recently stumbled across the following headline in Scientific American:

Eating Soy Boosts Tamoxifen's Powers

Since I know of my fellow noders' interest, affection and even love of the brown gold *, I thought it'd be appreciated if I relayed said information.

The magazine reports that a recent study strongly suggested what the above headline says. This was presented at the annual conference of the American Association of Cancer Research, New Orleans, last Wednesday.

"Tamoxifen" you say, "what is that?"  Well, if you for some reason don't want to read girlotron's excellent writeup on the subject, let me just tell you that it's a "nonsteroidal estrogen antagonist" used for treating breast cancer, specifically estrogen-dependent tumors. It is also given prophylactically to some risk groups.

As you can see, this is further evidence of what akf2000 mentions under "Pros" in the previous writeup of this node. It turns out that by combining soy and tamoxifen, cancer tumors in their experiment was largely reduced compared to using only either of the two. The experiment was performed on carcinogen-induced tumors in rats, and gave the following result:

 

                             Reduction of  
                 Medication  number of tumors
                 ----------  ----------------
                 Tamoxifen   29 % 
                 Soy         37 %

                 Both 
                 combined    62 %          
 

My impression - given the results of the two "medications" by themselves - would of course be that

Eating Tamoxifen Boosts Soy's Powers

but that wouldn't help funding cancer research, I guess. The next step will be tests on humans, according to Andreas Constantinou of University of Illinois, Chicago.


Source: Scientific American