Older Prostate Cancer May Not Benefit From Treatment
July 10, 2008 by Gloria Gamat
Filed under Diseases & Conditions
Some hormone-blocking drugs may not be beneficial to the elderly prostate cancer patients.
Such were the findings of a new prostate cancer study.
A prostate cancer study that could change how doctors treat some patients found that widely used hormone-blocking drugs did not improve survival chances for older men whose disease hadn’t spread.
In fact, men given the drugs alone were slightly more likely to die of prostate cancer during the next six years than men who’d gotten medical monitoring but no or delayed treatment, another common treatment approach.
The study involved nearly 20,000 Medicare patients with prostate cancer that hadn’t spread. A surprising 41 percent got only drug treatment, in shots or implants, showing that the therapy has become a popular alternative to surgery and radiation, the study authors said.
Well…hopefully the doctors will change their advice on course of treatment, right? Indeed it is always tricky which course of treatment will work with every patient. I don’t know, sometimes I feel that we are at the mercy of our doctors and science itself with regards to cancer. But of course, I don’t wanna be totally negative about what cancer drugs do to the patient. Know what I mean?
Read more from AP.
