This article is more than 5 years old. Information may no longer be current.
Adding radiation to hormone therapy improved survival in patients with prostate cancer
Click Here to Manage Email Alerts
52nd ASTRO Annual Meeting
Patients with prostate cancer treated with a combination of lifelong androgen deprivation therapy and radiation had better survival compared with patients who were not treated with radiation.
The findings of this study are practice-changing because they highlight the importance of radiation in the treatment of patients with high-risk, localized prostate cancer, according to Malcolm Mason, MD, radiation oncologist at Cardiff University in the United Kingdom. “It shows that the standard treatment for these patients should now be hormone therapy plus radiation,” Mason said during a news briefing.
In a randomized study, from 1995 to 2005, 1,205 men with high-risk prostate cancer in the United States, the United Kingdom and Canada were assigned to hormone therapy alone or to combination hormone therapy plus external beam radiation treatment.
Patients were followed an average of at least 6 years. The National Cancer Institute of Canada, the United Kingdom Medical Research Council and the Southwest Oncology Group in the United States jointly conducted the study.
According to the researchers, although the number of men treated with combined hormone and radiation therapy has increased in recent years, there are still many patients treated with hormone therapy alone.
Interim findings from this study demonstrated that adding radiation therapy significantly reduced the risk for death with no increase in long-term side effects associated with the treatment. The most commonly reported adverse effects were mild bowel and bladder problems. Final analysis will be released after further patient follow-up.
The risk for death decreased with combination therapy (HR=0.77; 95% CI, 0.61-0.98). Disease-specific survival favored the combination group with an HR of 0.57 (95% CI, 0.41-0.81). The 10-year cumulative disease-specific death rate was 15% for combination therapy vs. 23% with hormone therapy alone.
“If the figures from the interim analysis are similar to the final analysis, we would expect a 43% reduction in the chances of death from prostate cancer in men with this regimen,” Mason said in a press release. “This would translate into a reduction in the chances of deaths from prostate cancer in many thousands of men worldwide.”
For more information:
 |
Follow HemOncToday.com on Twitter. |