Source Medwire News

Adding local radiotherapy to endocrine treatment halves the 10-year prostate cancer-specific mortality in patients with locally advanced or high-risk local prostate cancer compared with endocrine treatment alone, researchers report.

"In the light of these data, endocrine treatment plus radiotherapy should be the new standard," Anders Widmark (Umeå University, Sweden) and team write in The Lancet.

This study looked at 875 patients with locally advanced prostate cancer (T3; 78%; PSA<70; N0; M0) without evidence of distant spread. These men were from multiple centers in Norway, Sweden, and Denmark. In this set of patients, adding radiation helped men live longer compared to hormonal therapy alone.

The only difference in my practice, and in many centers in the US is that we sometimes perform surgery for these patients as well. The other difference is that these patients were given continuous endocrine treatment using flutamide, which is not as effective as other hormonal therapy regimens that we usually use (gonadotropin-releasing hormone ( GnRH) agonists).