Prostate-Cancer Treatment Questioned

Hormone therapy, an aggressive treatment for prostate cancer, may be overused, a new study suggests.

Treatment used to reduce the size of the prostate has been shown to improve survival in advanced cancers, health club but doctors have increasingly been giving hormone therapy in less-severe cases.

The study, published in this week's New England Journal of Medicine, charted the quality of life for 1,201 men and their partners after the men received three kinds of prostate-cancer treatment: removal of the prostate; implantation of radioactive seeds; and radiation therapy in a laboratory. The prostate is a gland that helps make semen.

About a third of the patients who received radiation therapy or radioactive seeds also took hormones, and those patients had more problems with energy and sexual function health club. Doctors and patients made their own decisions about what treatments to take and weren't assigned to different groups by the study, so the study's conclusions are more suggestive than definitive.

Martin Sanda, a urologist at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, who led the study, said the findings would "throw a splashful of cold water" on the practice of providing hormone therapy for less-severe cancers.

"Doctors or their patients should think twice if they're considering hormone therapy," Dr. Sanda said health club. "Most of the cancers that are treated nowadays are not really that aggressive."

Treating prostate cancer is a balancing act. Aggressive treatments and surgery can usually cure it -- more than 99% of patients now survive at least five years, up from 69% thirty years ago. But too much treatment can make a patient needlessly miserable.

In the U.S., about one in six men will be diagnosed with prostate cancer over their lifetimes, according to the American Cancer Society. Among men, it is the most common cancer and the No. 2 killer, behind lung cancer. This year, that will be about 186,000 diagnoses and 28,700 deaths in the U.S., the society estimates.