Can tamoxifen relieve motion sickness?

Motion sickness (MS) is an unpleasant and sometimes disabling condition in response to the perception of certain kind of motions. Its pathogenesis is incompletely understood; interactions between endocrine mechanisms and the vestibular apparatus are likely, as suggested by a higher incidence and severity of MS in females and pregnancy, the reported changes in MS susceptibility during the menstrual cycle, and an affinity with migraine [1, 2]. We recently heard about two sisters, both breast cancer patients who were followed-up at the European Institute of Oncology in Milan (Table 1), who had experienced a striking reduction of their intense sea sickness after receiving tamoxifen (TAM). We evaluated the patients by means of a standardized MS susceptibility questionnaire (MSSQ-short) [3]. MSSQ-short evaluates the experience of sickness following nine types of transport or motion before the age of 12 and ‘over the last 10 years’, and three different scores are calculated to express MS susceptibility: a childhood score (MSA), an adulthood score (MSB) and a MSSQ-short raw score (MSA + MSB). To evaluate the changes in MS after TAM therapy, the patients were asked to fill in, retrospectively, MSSQ-short questionnaires for periods preceding and following the start of TAM. Two MSSQ raw scores, one for the pre-TAM period and one for the postTAM period, could be obtained and compared. As MSSQ-short was not originally intended to be used for the assessment of MS modification following any kind of intervention, our modification should only be regarded as an explorative attempt to look at