Radiotherapy and hormone halved the death rate for prostate
February 23, 2009 by
Filed under World new
London, Dec 15 – A combination of radiotherapy and endocrine therapy for hormone-based-reduce by half the mortality of suffering from advanced prostate cancer.
Such are the conclusions of authors of an article published in the Internet edition of the British medical journal The Lancet and author who is a team led by Professor Anders Widmark, Department of Radiation Sciences, University of Umea (Sweden).
In a randomized trial phase III, a group of 439 men who had locally advanced prostate cancer were subjected to endocrine therapy alone – three months of androgen blockade followed by continuous endocrine therapy based on flutamide-436 men, while others continued the same endocrine therapy combined with radiotherapy.
During the following 7.6 years, 79 individuals of the first group and 37 of the second died of cancer, says study that the mortality after ten years in the first group – a 23.9 per cent – was double that of the group in which both therapies were combined: 11.9 percent.
The death rate from all causes was also higher in the group who underwent endocrine therapy only in the second.
The cumulative incidence of repeat prostate cancer at ten years was almost three times higher in the first group than the other.
After five years, urinary problems, sexual or rectum combined treatment group, however, were slightly more frequent in the combined treatment group than in the endocrine therapy exclusively.
The authors conclude from this, the “significantly higher” in the endocrine therapy combined with radiation therapy compared with single treatment of the first type in such patients.
This difference, which reached 12 percent after ten years, resulted in an improvement of 9.8 percent of overall survival, and the author of the study recommends that treatment for these widespread ill.
