Prostate Patients with Heart Disease Should Avoid from Using Hormone Treatments

Through a recent medical research it is been found that the hormone based medicines which block tumor-fueling surges of testosterone hormone usually help the most of men who get them but men with heart disease or diabetes have a higher risk of death when they got the drugs along with radiation therapy.

This medical research was conducted by Dr. Anthony D’Amico of Brigham & Women’s Hospital and the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston and colleagues whom studied the cases of more than 5,000 men diagnosed with prostate cancer between 1997 and 2006.

They found men who received radiation treatment, either external beam radiation, or little radioactive pellets called brachy therapy, plus one of several drugs to dampen testosterone hormone production. Men who suffered from heart failure or had a heart attack were more than twice as likely to die as those without heart disease or who had just one symptom, such as high blood cholesterol. The researchers said 26 percent of the men with heart failure or who had a heart attack died, compared to 11 percent of others.

This was just five percent of the men, so the findings explain why overall, hormone replacement therapy helps prostate cancer patients, D’Amico’s team wrote. But men with serious heart disease and their doctors need to know the risk, they added.

Many prostate tumors are slow-growing and take years to cause harm, and some doctors are beginning to advocate less aggressive treatment for some patients.