Advanced prostate cancer can be effectively treated with a combination of radiation and hormone therapy, according to a new study from Canadian and British researchers.
"These patients were often felt, in the past, to be incurable, because the disease has spread locally outside of the prostate, but not elsewhere in the body," study author Dr. Padraig Warde, deputy head of the Princess Margaret Hospital Cancer Program and a professor of radiation oncology at the University of Toronto, told HealthDay. "But they shouldn't be discarded, we are showing that going for a cure is worthwhile."
Warde's study involved more than 1,200 men with high-risk, or locally advanced, prostate cancer, who in the past were often treated with hormone therapy alone. They were given either hormone therapy alone or hormones in combination with radiation.
After seven years, researchers found that about two-thirds of the men who received hormone therapy alone were still alive, while 74 percent who got the combination were still alive. Twenty-six percent of the hormones-only group died from prostate cancer, but just 10 percent who had combination therapy died. The study was the first to show the combination treatment improved survival rates.
