Today, we’re speaking to Dr Sophie McGrath, Consultant Medical Oncologist based at the Royal Marsden NHS Foundation Trust and at Kingston Hospital in London.

Title of paper: Management of menopausal symptoms following treatment for hormone receptor positive breast cancer

Available at: https://doi.org/10.3399/BJGP.2025.0264

This transcript was generated using AI and has not been reviewed for accuracy. Please be aware it may contain errors or omissions.

Speaker A

00:00:00.800 - 00:01:11.660

Hello and welcome to BJJP Interviews. My name is Nada Khan and I'm one of the associate editors of the bjgp. Thanks for joining us today to listen to this podcast.

In today's episode, we're speaking to Dr. Sophie McGrath, who is a consultant medical oncologist based at the Royal Morrison NHS Trust and at Kingston Hospital in London.

We're here to talk about the recent analysis article that she and her colleagues have published here in the BJDP titled Management of Menopausal Symptoms Following Treatment for Hormone Receptor Positive Breast Cancer.

And just to point out that these colleagues included not just medical oncologists, but also GPs and patients, which I think has really shaped this article and is one of the reasons why we wanted to highlight it here in the podcast. So, hi Sophie, thanks for meeting me to talk about this article, which I think touches on a really important topic in practice.

But talk us through some of the initial side effects that you discuss in the introduction here. Just in terms of hormone positive breast cancer, what kind of symptoms do women experience generally as a result of endocrine therapy?

Speaker B

00:01:12.220 - 00:02:32.900

So, yeah, thanks very much for asking. And it's a bit of a broad answer that I would give.

I mean, I've focused on, or we have focused on three main symptoms within the article which relate to hot flushes or vasomotor symptoms, also to joint stiffness and pain and swelling, arthralgia, and also to vulvovaginal symptoms, otherwise known as genitourinary syndrome of menopause.

But I think what we've tried to include within the article as well is a table that certainly acknowledges that there are unfortunately many other symptoms that women can get as a result of these medications, essentially mimicking menopausal side effects.

And of course, you know, these might be symptoms that women having already gone through the menopause may have suffered or experienced at some point already.

But actually for a population of premenopausal women, these will be symptoms that they haven't had any experience of yet and can often be quite intense and develop quite suddenly. Whereas often our post menopausal women have had some sort of lead up to this, they've had some experience.

Speaker A

00:02:34.710 - 00:02:44.710

And you work as a medical oncologist. But just talk me through your own experience of working with women who are going through the sort of sudden menopause as you describe as well.

Speaker B

00:02:45.350 - 00:05:50.240

So obviously the focus of the article here is on menopausal side effects in general from the treatments that we use. And we've talked a lot about using our endocrine treatments such as tamoxifen, letrozole.

But actually many of our women also experience menopausal type side effect secondary to the chemotherapies we give them. So I think, you know, there's sort of two groups you often have, particularly premenopausal women who stop their periods whilst on chemotherapy.

That may happen several weeks into their chemotherapy treatment and it can be quite sudden.

You know, they're already dealing with the numerous side...