Recovery time after Anastrozole/aromatase inhibitors

@megunique
I was on it for the 5 years, and have now been off a little over 2 months.. some of the milder side effects have improved, but my joint and muscle pain has not.. I don’t even see an improvement yet. I was getting a little discouraged until I saw your post. If you’ve heard it can take 3-9 months, I still have some hope that it will get better.. as of now, I haven’t even seen an improvement..

I took it for 7 months. The worst side effects were cataracts, detached retina and the most annoying is carpal tunnel.
Has anyone had these side effects? Do they ever get better?

Thank you for your post. I’ve read all the statements of AI patients so far on this subject, but I haven’t seen anyone stated anything about their eye health, other than dry eye. Cataracts sound like a an unusual side effect. However, I will say after five years on anastrozole I was feeling like I had fibromyalgia and yes, carpal tunnel as well. Heading to my oncologist today and will discuss many of the things I have read in this post. good luck to you as well.

Hopefully your oncologist will respond with honesty. Sometimes I think they’re thin on information either because they don’t know or they realize that the intuitive sense of cancer overrides their research!

It took a year for all the foot and hand pain to go away. But I needed 2 trigger finger surgeries, and cortisone injections to both hands and one ankle. Pain was debilitating, was on Anastrozol, then Exemastane, just over a year in total. Also needed cortisone injection to my hip joint. Horrible drugs!

On Tamoxifen instead, no pain.

I have been on Anastrozole for over two years. I have had to take one month breaks three times. It helped. But a month is definitely not long enough to completely recover from side effects. Exemestane was not better when I tried it so I stayed with Anastrozole. My first onco said I should be on it for 10 years. Every single day is a struggle. My sister also had breast cancer and she stopped Anastrozole after just a few months. She has no side effects. Her cancer was very early stage and she just had a lumpectomy and no chemo. I had chemo, double mastectomy and radiation. My recurrence scores were much higher. So I am trying to stick with the regimen. There’s really no way to know how an individual will respond to the side effects. I struggled with pain for several months and now just experience fatigue and nausea. Taking it at night helps.

This is a long winded way to say that your diagnosis and individual experience with the drug is probably very different from anyone else’s. Some people have no issues and others have every problem known to science. Hopefully you’ll improve a bit every day. But it may be unnoticeable at first.

@barbbillas
I have been told that tamoxifen is for premenopausal patients. But the research I have read doesn’t actually say that. I worked on editing and proofreading the drug insert as part of my job back in the early 2000s. Tamoxifen trials were very successful. That was before the AI drugs were introduced. I have often wondered if the effectiveness of AIs for post menopausal patients is significant enough to justify the side effects. What have your doctors said about this issue?

@dmr4ever u
Yes, Tamoxifen is for premenopausal women as it acts on the ovaries to reduce estrogen production. Post menopausal women's ovaries have naturally reduced production. The AI meds target aromatase, an enzyme that helps convert testerone to estrogen. So it's a double whammy of reducing estrogen to almost nothing with debilitating effects for many women.
AI meds do have a greater efficiency for post menopausal women according to studies. But if there's no quality of life due to side effects, it wasn't worth it for me. My oncologist switched me to Tamoxifen as it still provides a benefit to reduce recurrence, while leaving me with some estrogen to get through life.

There are good academic studies on Pubmed. They were pretty easy to find. Also, if you ask Google Gemini "Tamoxifen vs Aromatase Inhibitors with citations", it may bring up those studies.