Study: Radiation boosts prostate cancer survival

CHICAGO - Doctors are reporting a key advance in treating men with cancer that has started to spread beyond the prostate: Survival is significantly better if radiation is added to standard hormone treatments.

Results of the study were given yesterday at the annual meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncology, at which other research showed that an experimental drug boosted survival for women with very advanced breast cancer. The drug, eribulin, is being reviewed by the federal Food and Drug Administration.

The prostate study has the potential to change care right away.

In about 20 percent of the nearly 200,000 cases of the disease diagnosed each year in the United States the cancer has spread to the area around the prostate.

"It is this group of patients in whom many of the deaths from prostate cancer occur," because once the cancer spreads it is usually incurable, said study leader Dr. Padraig Warde, a radiation expert from the University of Toronto's Princess Margaret Hospital.

These men are treated with drugs that block testosterone, a hormone that helps prostate cancer grow. Only about half also get radiation, because it causes urinary problems.

Even though these treatments have been used for decades, few studies have been done to establish their value alone or in combination.

The new study assigned 1,200 men to get hormones plus radiation or hormones alone. After seven years, 74 percent of men receiving both treatments were alive versus 66 percent of the others. Those on both treatments lived an average of six months longer than those given just hormones.Serious side effects occurred in less than 2 percent of men in either group. The study was sponsored by the National Cancer Institute of Canada.

The results show that "radiation is an indispensable element in the treatment of patients with high-risk prostate cancer," said Dr. Jennifer Obel, a cancer specialist at Northshore University Health System in suburban Chicago who had no role in the study.

Dr. Otis Brawley, the American Cancer Society's chief medical officer, praised the survival advantage but said he wished it were larger.

"It's a practice-changing study in certain countries," especially in Europe, where more men are diagnosed with locally advanced tumors than in the United States, he said.

In the United States, about 192,280 new cases of prostate cancer were diagnosed last year, and it claimed 27,360 lives.

The breast cancer study tested eribulin, a drug derived from a sea sponge. Unlike Herceptin and other gene-targeted drugs that have been the focus of cancer research for the past decade, this one is a chemotherapy - a drug that kills cancer cells, in this case by attacking cell division in a novel way.