ASCO GU 2013

Pelvic radiotherapy and androgen blockade for high risk prostate cancer

Dr Abdenour Nabid – Sherbrooke University, Quebec, Canada

We asked the question: can we reduce by half the duration of androgen blockade in these patients? And you know the side effects for the patients are very important, especially the castration syndrome. In the study we did with 630 patients, it’s a phase III randomised study, we demonstrated that we can safely reduce the duration of androgen blockade from 36 to 18 months.

So what are the recommendations coming out of this now for doctors?

For doctors right now the guidelines state that this duration is between 24 to 36 months. So the first recommendation is to use 24 months of androgen blockade and we will soon publish the data. When the data will be available for doctors then they will look at them and decide if they want to reduce again the duration from 24 to 18 months.

What is the take home message for clinicians?

Reducing androgen blockade for localised high-risk prostate cancer is feasible, safely and for the patients it’s very, very important because we are reducing the duration of the side effects of androgen blockade and also we are significantly reducing the costs of drugs.