Women now have another drug they can take to prevent breast cancer from returning after surgery to remove the tumor.

The federal Food and Drug Administration on Wednesday approved a new use for Femara, a medication already licensed for treating advanced breast cancer. It now can be given as initial therapy to women past menopause who have early breast cancer, the agency said.

In today's New England Journal of Medicine, a study reports that Femara was more effective at preventing recurrences than the current gold standard, tamoxifen.

Femara and Arimidex, a similar drug already licensed for early breast cancer, are aromatase inhibitors, which block production of estrogen, a hormone that fuels the growth of most tumors that develop after menopause. Tamoxifen works differently, by blunting the ability of estrogen to enter cells.

The published study, reported earlier this year in Europe, estimated that 84 percent of women given Femara versus 81 percent of those on tamoxifen would be alive without any signs of cancer five years after starting treatment.

The estimates were based on roughly two years of information on relapses among the 8,000 women in the study, done by researchers in the United States, Europe and Australia.

It was financed by Femara's maker, Novartis. Many of the researchers own stock in or are consultants for Novartis or companies with rival drugs.

Several other studies have shown Femara or Arimidex to be better either as initial treatment or after a couple years of tamoxifen.

"These trials, with close to 30,000 participants, consistently demonstrate that treatment with an aromatase inhibitor alone or after tamoxifen treatment is beneficial," Dr. Sandra Swain of the National Cancer Institute wrote in an editorial in the journal.

CLEVELAND — An immigration judge Wednesday ordered John Demjanjuk, a retired auto worker accused of being a Nazi concentration camp guard, deported to his native Ukraine, bringing him a step closer to being permanently removed from the U.S. after a 30-year legal battle.Demjanjuk, 85, has been fighting to stay in this country since the 1970s. He was suspected for a time of being the notoriously brutal guard known as Ivan the Terrible and was nearly executed in Israel.Chief U.S. Immigration Judge Michael Creppy ruled that there was no evidence to substantiate Demjanjuk's claim that he would be tortured if deported to his homeland. He said Demjanjuk should be deported to Germany or Poland if Ukraine does not accept him.Demjanjuk can appeal the ruling to the Board of Immigration Appeals within 30 days.Demjanjuk lost his U.S. citizenship after a judge ruled in 2002 that documents from World War II prove he was a Nazi guard at various death or forced labor camps.His attorney had argued at a hearing last month that sending Demjanjuk back to Ukraine would be like throwing him "into a shark tank."John Broadley, Demjanjuk's lawyer, said Wednesday's ruling is the judge's final order in the case. It was required before a June ruling authorizing the government to deport Demjanjuk could be appealed.