Can chemotherapy be used to treat advanced-stage prostate cancer?
Traditionally, chemotherapy has had a limited role in advanced prostate cancer. Fortunately, there have been some advances in men with advanced hormone-refractory prostate cancer, very late stage disease. The initial advance in chemotherapy was a drug called mitoxantrone, which, while it did not prolong survival, it did help with symptoms of pain. Men who were on the drug had greater pain relief than men who weren’t. More recently another drug, Taxotere, has been shown to actually not only help with pain, but also prolonged survival in metastatic prostate cancer. How long can the new chemotherapy drug prolong life? The survival advantage in the large clinical trials looking at Taxotere showed a modest benefit, in the range of 2 to 3 months. And while that doesn’t sound like a prolonged period of time, life expectancy in men with advanced prostate cancer is only about 14 to 16 months. So an extra 2 to 3 months is actually significant. Even more significant is the fact that doctors had n
