For the new study, published in the Journal of Urology, researchers tapped into data from three clinical trials involving more than 3,000 men who got hormone treatment for prostate cancer that had spread to the bones and other body parts.
The average patient survived 30 months after starting treatment in 1985 to 1987. By 1989 to 1994, survival was three months longer and by 1995 to 2009, well into the “PSA era,” it had reached 49 months.
“It’s a remarkable difference,” said Dr. Ian Thompson, who heads the Cancer Therapy and Research Center at the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio and led the study.
“The translation of this is, might it very well be that for advanced prostate cancer finding it earlier may allow the earlier initiation of therapy that may then reduce the death rates from the disease?” he told Reuters Health.
But the chief medical officer of the American Cancer Society, who was not involved in the work, said the study has a number of serious shortcomings.
For instance, other trials done by the same research group but involving non-Hodgkin lymphoma, a group of blood cancers, also show patients live longer over time, according to Dr. Otis Brawley.
And that’s despite the facts that doctors don’t screen for the disease and that patients got the same treatment for their disease.
“There is a cohort effect that we have seen numerous times in medicine,” said Brawley, who has collaborated with Thompson on earlier research.
He added that the reasons for the improved survival over time are unclear, but could be related to advances in medical care and infection control.
It is also possible that men today are more aware of symptoms that would have been ignored a quarter-century ago, such as trouble urinating, Brawley said.
No comments:
Post a Comment