HEALTH NEWS

Add to radiation therapy standard drug treatment can halve the death rate from advanced prostate cancer and should become the standard of care worldwide, Swedish researchers reported on Monday.
Their study of more than 800 patients with prostate cancer showed that almost 24 percent of men who have only the standard drug had died after 10 years, compared with just under 12 percent of men who also has radiation treatment.

Adding radiation does not add too many side effects, he wrote in the journal Lancet Oncology.

“The quality of life and adverse effect profile is acceptable. We therefore suggest that endocrine therapy in addition to radiotherapy should be the new standard of care for these patients,” Anders Widmark of the University of Umea in Sweden and its colleagues wrote.

“The findings should change the current practice of long-term hormone radical radiotherapy and the quality of care for men with locally advanced prostate cancer,” Dr. Chris Parker and Alex Tan of Great Britain’s Research Institute Cancer in Sutton, Surrey, wrote in a commentary.

Prostate cancer is the second leading cancer murderer of men, killing 221,000 each year worldwide, with 679,000 new cases diagnosed.

It is easy to cure in the early stages with surgery or radiation. For prostate cancer that has spread, drugs that interfere with the cancer that feeds the hormones are prescribed.

In the United States, the addition of radiation therapy is now standard, said Dr. Howard Sandler, chairman of the Radiation Oncology at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles and a spokesman for the American Society of Clinical Oncology.

He said that health agencies in Europe do not always provide radiation as the level of attention. “A 50 percent reduction in risk of death from prostate cancer is a real clinical benefit,” Sandler said in a telephone interview.

“The radiation therapy that was performed here (the study) was a bit simplistic,” said Sandler. “Modern radiation therapy with higher doses, if anything, could increase profits.” (Source: Reuters)