A drug combination could lengthen the lives of men with "newly diagnosed metastatic, hormone-sensitive prostate cancer" by an average of one year.
A research team found that providing chemotherapy right away instead of waiting for the disease to become resistant to hormone-blockers significantly improved the life expectancy of these patients, a Dana-Farber Cancer Institute news release reported.
"This is the first study to identify a strategy that prolongs survival in newly diagnosed, metastatic prostate cancer," Christopher J. Sweeney, M.B.B.S, of Dana-Farber's Lank Center for Genitourinary Oncology, said in the news release.
"The benefit is substantial and warrants this being a new standard treatment for men who have high-extent disease and are fit for chemotherapy," Sweeney said.
In today's medical practices men who have been diagnosed with prostate cancer that has spread and relies on male hormones to grow are put on hormone-blockers. This medication is called androgen deprivation therapy (ADT); most tumors get past their need for hormones and continue to grow anyway. At this point patients are usually put on chemotherapy.
The researchers looked at 790 men who had been recently diagnosed with the disease. The participants either received ADT exclusively or in combination with the drug docetaxel; 124 patients in the ADT-only group were given docetaxel only after their condition got worse.
In a follow-up 29 months later 136 patients in the ADT-only group had passed away compared with 101 in the group that received both drugs. The drug combination had even larger benefits for those whose cancer had spread to major organs.
The most serious side effects seen in the study were neutropenic fever and neuropathy, one patient passed away from these symptoms.
"This study shows that early chemotherapy increases the chances that certain patients with metastatic prostate cancer have a longer time without symptoms from cancer, and also live longer," Sweeney said.
