A new study suggests that, when treating locally invasive prostate cancer, patients response to hormone therapy which is the standard treatment may be significantly improved by adding radiotherapy to the treatment regimen.
Prostate cancer is the second most common cancer in men around the world, right after lung cancer; it kills over 250,000 men globally (about 32,000 in the United States) each year. Recently, a study just published in The Lancet, looked at more than 1,200 men with locally advanced prostate cancer. From 1995 to 2005, half of the men were treated with hormone therapy (the current standard of care), which blocks testosterone production in order to reduce the hormone's effects on the prostate; meanwhile, the other half received hormone therapy plus local irradiation. The difference between the two treatments was soon clear: The men who received local irradiation were 46 percent less likely to die from the cancer during the six-plus years of follow-up than those who received hormone therapy alone.
The disparate treatment outcomes were so impressive that an independent safety monitoring committee recommended stopping the study and releasing the results early. Adding radiotherapy to the standard hormone treatment could thus significantly benefit men who are diagnosed with this illness, notes ACSH s Dr. Gilbert Ross. It may well become the new standard of care for men with non-metastatic prostate cancer.
