September 28, 2015 – Advanced Prostate Cancer

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Anchor lead: A new strategy may improve the outlook for men with advanced prostate cancer, Elizabeth Tracey reports

Depriving the body of the male hormone testosterone is one way of treating prostate cancer.  Now a new study shows that when combined with the chemotherapy drug docetaxel, such a strategy may be even more effective.  William Nelson, director of the Kimmel Cancer Center at Johns Hopkins and a prostate cancer expert, describes the findings.

Nelson: What they did is take a chemotherapy that’s often used after the hormonal therapy is no longer effective, docetaxel, and they took men, almost 1800 of them, randomly assigned them to get hormonal therapy or hormonal therapy and the docetaxel chemotherapy right from the start.  The chemotherapy basically tremendously improved overall survival, length of time that that treatment was effective, in a very convincing way, enough that it should become the standard of care.   :29

Nelson predicts that the combination of hormone therapy and docetaxel will be the treatment of choice immediately for men who are eligible.  At Johns Hopkins, I’m Elizabeth Tracey.