By Charlie Schmidt
When prostate cancer has spread outside the prostate gland, the usual treatment is androgen deprivation therapy (ADT). This treatment reduces the production of testosterone within the body. Prostate cancer cells need testosterone (a sort of hormone called an androgen) to grow. ADT works for a time, but eventually the cancer cells develop into proof against it and start to grow and spread again. Currently, doctors normally add a chemotherapy drug called docetaxel to ADT.
After the primary scientists 2005 reported that docetaxel improved survival in men with advanced prostate cancer.some experts wondered if such men could survive even longer in the event that they received ADT and docetaxel at the identical time.
Dr. Christopher Sweeney and colleagues on the Link Center for Genitourinary Oncology on the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute recruited 790 men with advanced prostate cancer and randomly divided them into two groups. One group was given six cycles of ADT and docetaxel over 18 weeks, then ADT alone. The second group was initially treated with ADT alone, after which began on docetaxel if their cancer progressed.
Men who initially received the ADT/docetaxel combination lived a median of about 58 months longer than men who were initially treated with ADT alone. Men with essentially the most advanced cancer benefited essentially the most from the mixture — they lived about 49 months, or 17 months longer than men who were began on ADT alone. There were results. Presented at the 2014 Annual Meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncology, Chicago.
Sweeney emphasized that the combined treatment is just appropriate for men who're “chemotherapy-eligible,” meaning they're old, frail, or not in poor health with other potentially life-threatening conditions.
Keep in mind that these findings have yet to be published in a peer-reviewed medical journal. Other scientists might want to review these findings before they may be widely accepted. This is particularly essential because some men have difficulty tolerating docetaxel.
Clifford Hodes, MD, president of the American Society of Clinical Oncology and chief of the breast cancer medical service at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York, said the outcomes revealed an “almost unprecedented improvement in survival” that may very well be “transformational.” . Prostate cancer care.