Prostate cancer: live longer thanks to early chemotherapy
All content is checked by medical journalists.MunichMen with advanced prostate cancer are given drugs that stop testosterone production in the testes. In this way, tumor growth can be delayed for a while. Chemotherapy is currently only prescribed when the tumor becomes more active again. But that may not be enough.
Various studies show that the average survival time of seriously ill men is significantly extended if chemotherapy and anti-hormone therapy are used in parallel right from the start.
Effective combination therapy
As the Deutsches Ärzteblatt reports, this is indicated by the preliminary results of a large study on the treatment of prostate cancer. More than 6,500 prostate cancer patients had participated in the so-called STAMPEDE study since 2005. Around 3,000 of them started anti-hormone therapy. Some of them received six cycles of the chemotherapy drug docetaxel in parallel.
After 42 months, almost a third of the patients had died. Men who received the additional chemotherapy lived an average of ten months longer.
Survive longer
The results of a smaller study that was presented at a meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncology last year are even clearer. Christopher Sweeney's team from the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston had recruited 790 men whose prostate cancer had already formed daughter tumors in other regions of the body. Those who received six cycles of docetaxel in addition to the sex hormone-blocking drugs lived an average of 14 months longer. The more advanced the disease was at the start of treatment, the greater the effect - patients with pronounced metastasis even lived on average 17 months longer than their fellow sufferers with the same severity under the two-pronged treatment.
The results are so impressive that experts are discussing whether not all men with metastatic prostate cancer should receive the same chemotherapy treatment. Early chemotherapy may also benefit patients whose cancer has advanced but has not yet spread. The treatment was accompanied by side effects, but these were apparently not too severe, so that very few patients discontinued the therapy.
At the moment, early chemotherapy is not included in the guidelines for the treatment of prostate cancer. However, it is possible as so-called off-label therapy.
Prostate cancer - common but rarely fatal
Prostate cancer is the most common cancer in men. Compared to other types of cancer, however, it is rarely fatal: According to the Robert Koch Institute, 93 percent of the newly diagnosed men are still alive after five years. The prognosis is much worse, however, if the cancer is already well advanced at the time of detection and has already spread metastases. In addition to very slowly growing tumors that may not need treatment at all, there are also tumors that grow quickly and are very aggressive. (cf)
Source:
Nicholas David James: Docetaxel and / or zoledronic acid for hormone-naïve prostate cancer: First overall survival results from STAMPEDE (NCT00268476), J Clin Oncol 33, 2015 (suppl; abstr 5001), 2015 ASCO Annual Meeting
Prostate Cancer: Early Chemotherapy Extends Lives; ärzteblatt.de Friday, May 15, 2015
Tags: parasites hair sleep
