Giving prostate cancer drug earlier extends lives of men whose disease has spread

Offering a drug up-front with standard hormone treatment extends survival in men whose prostate cancer has spread, according to results from a late stage clinical trial. The results, to be presented at the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) Annual Meeting in Chicago, show that adding the drug abiraterone (Zytiga) to hormone therapy lowered the risk of death in men whose disease had spread at the time of diagnosis. The combined treatment also more than doubled the time before patients’ disease worsened, according to results that have been published in the New England Journal of Medicine. “The benefit from early use of abiraterone we saw in this study is at least comparable to the benefit from docetaxel chemotherapy, which was observed in prior clinical trials, but abiraterone is much easier to tolerate, with many patients reporting no side effects at all,” said lead study author Dr Karim Fizazi, head of the Department of Cancer Medicine at Gustave Roussy in Paris.

See original article at: https://www.cancerresearchuk.org/about-us/cancer-news/news-report/2017-06-03-giving-prostate-cancer-drug-earlier-extends-lives-of-men-whose-disease-has-spread