Hormone‐refractory prostate cancer: what have we learned?

Abstract

The current EAU guidelines recommend continued androgen suppression in patients not treated by orchidectony and with HRPC, although few studies have addressed the benefits of this approach. The EAU recommendation was based primarily on evidence reported by Manni et al. [4], who conducted a small randomized trial to determine whether androgen priming potentiates the cytotoxic effects of chemotherapy. In all, 85 men with disease progression despite orchidectomy were randomly selected to receive androgen priming or chemotherapy alone. The median survival of men who received androgen priming (10 months) was significantly worse than that of men who did not (15 months; P = 0.005), a result indicating that continuous androgen blockade might be beneficial in men with HRPC.