Using docetaxel early gives two years more prostate survival
New research has shown that providing men with chemotherapy as soon as the cancer spreads beyond the prostate can give men up to two years more survival time.
The study led by Professor Nicholas James, director of the Cancer Research Unit at the University of Warwick followed 3,000 men – about 60% with cancer that had spread and 40% with locally advanced cancer.
Most men develop the disease after the age of 65 and research reports from Sweden, and others from the USA have concluded that after that age, the treatment is as harmful as the disease, and that little increment in survival was shown by treatment. Typically surgery and radiotherapy are offered. Later hormone therapy is used ‘to reduce testosterone levels’, itself controversial since research from a number of top medical schools including MD Anderson suggests that oestrogen is the real driver, turning safe testosterone into DHT.
This research showed that UK men typically lived for just three years seven months after spread beyond the prostate. When docetaxel chemotherapy was given immediately after spread, alongside the hormone therapy, the average survival rose to five years and five months. If the subject had locally advanced cancer, survival averaged six years and five months.
The UK has almost 40,000 cases diagnosed of prostate cancer a year. 5-year survival rate is one of the lowest in Europe. Across the whole of Europe 5-year survival has risen from 73 % in 199 to 82% in 2008. Typically:
- Austria 90.4%
- Finland 90.1%
- Belgium 89.6%
- Germany 89.4%
- France 88.9%
- Sweden 87.5%
- England 80.4%
- Scotland 78.9%
(Source: Eurocare 5)
Remember, please, these statistics represent survival from moment of diagnosis