Increased survival is associated with dual therapy

Healthcare in Sweden gradually introduced dual therapy for prostate cancer in the second half of the 2000s. Dual therapy means that patients receive standard hormone therapy, plus chemotherapy or so-called androgen receptor blockers.

Now researchers have In Sweden and Italy, a study found that the introduction of dual therapy appears to be able to increase survival. The study is published in JAMA Network Open.

Dual treatment in guidelines

At present, the National Prostate Cancer Care Program recommends dual therapy. This is based on clinical studies where men who received dual therapy lived longer than those who received hormone therapy alone.

Now researchers have In the current study, it was shown that even the introduction of dual therapy into routine health care seems to be able to increase survival.

Researchers at Uppsala University and San Raffaele Hospital in Milan, Italy, studied all men diagnosed with metastatic prostate cancer in Sweden during the years 2008-2020. They used data from the National Prostate Cancer Registry.

Survival increased

The results showed that in 2016, only 1% of all men at this stage were still receiving dual therapy. In 2020, the rate of dual therapy reached 40 percent.

The increase was the largest among men under 65 years of age and lowest among men over 80 years of age.

The median survival time after diagnosis increased at the same time from 2.7 years to 3.2 years. This corresponds to approximately half a year. The survival rate increased most among men younger than 80 years.

Clear time connection

The researchers stress that factors other than altered treatment could also have contributed to patients living longer. But they still believe that double treatment is the main reason.

– Even a man We must be careful when interpreting our results, as we found a clear temporal relationship between the introduction of dual therapy and improved survival, says Markus Westerberg from the Department of Surgical Sciences at Uppsala University and one of the researchers who conducted the study, in a study press release.

The study indicates that the treatment that gave good results in randomized studies also gives results at the population level when introduced into routine health care.