Hormone Blockade Effectively Controls Prostate Cancer

BY MARK SCHOLZ

Ralph Blum, my coauthor of Invasion of the Prostate Snatchers, monitored his prostate cancer for 14 years before starting treatment in 2004.  Prior to meeting me, Ralph had been living in Hawaii and managing his own case.  However, when his PSA rose above 10 he came to Marina del Rey for a consult. I advised him to start treatment with either IMRT or Testosterone Inactivating Pharmaceuticals (TIP).  Ralph, after considerable uncertainty and discussion, embarked on TIP for 12 months.  So far he has required no additional therapy.

At Prostate Oncology Specialists, back in the 1990s, when radiation was more prone to burn than cure, we commonly treated men with TIP followed by active surveillance. Our first published report on the feasibility of intermittent TIP was presented at the annual meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncology in 1997¹ and later published in The Oncologist in 2000.² In 2006 we updated our experience with intermittent TIP in the Journal of Urology and reported that Proscar (finasteride) extends the time-off period” after TIP is stopped.³

This December Clinical Genitourinary Cancer will publish our long-term outcome of 73 men treated at Prostate Oncology Specialists with TIP and monitored for a median of 12 years after treatment. A preprint of the article is available on our "publication" webpage found at prostateoncology.com. Here are the take-home messages we reported in the article about using TIP as first line treatment:

1.     Almost a third, 21 men, have not required any further treatment.

2.     One third, 24 men, have kept their PSA less than 5 with further cycles of TIP. 

3.     After an average of 5.5 years, slightly more than a third, 28 men, underwent delayed local therapy (surgery, seeds, IMRT or cryotherapy). After an additional six years observation, three men have developed a rising PSA (PSA relapse).

4.     Local treatment was administered much more frequently to younger men (whose testosterone recovered more quickly when TIP was stopped)—and to men with D’Amico High-Risk category disease (PSA > 20 or Gleason 8,9,10)—compared to older men and to men who were in the D’Amico Low-Risk or Intermediate-Risk categories.

5.     Mortality from prostate cancer was low.  After twelve years only three men (4%) died of prostate cancer, and none of the remaining 70 men developed metastatic disease. This result compares favorably to a group of 350 men with similar-stage prostate cancer treated with immediate surgery whose ten-year outcome was reported in the New England Journal of Medicine in 2005.⁴ In this group fifteen percent developed metastases and an additional ten percent died of prostate cancer. 

Unfortunately TIP, like all forms of prostate cancer treatment, is associated with a number of undesirable side effects including weight gain, muscle weakness, absent sex drive and hot flashes. However, for most men these side effects are either treatable⁵ or reversible.  Even so, as we have reported in the summary above, many men treated with TIP will, at some point, require further treatment, either with additional TIP or some form of local therapy.

All this not withstanding, in my mind there is no doubt that Testosterone Inactivating Pharmaceuticals (TIP), when appropriate and applied in a timely manner, acts effectively to control prostate cancer.

References:  Copies of all the articles referenced in this blog are available at our webpage  http://prostateoncology.com/education/publications

_________________________