Advanced Prostate Cancer Remains Sensitive To Treatment Even After Breaks From Chemotherapy

June 22, 2006

Advanced prostate cancer can be treated successfully with intermittent chemotherapy,
according to a study conducted by Oregon Health & Science University Cancer Institute
scientists.

This is important because the optimal duration of chemotherapy treatment for advanced prostate cancer is unknown. In many studies of newer chemotherapy drugs, patients are treated either for a fixed number of treatment cycles or until the disease progresses or until the side effects become intolerable. For patients who are responding to the chemotherapy, however, continuous chemotherapy may be exposing them to unnecessary toxicity.

"More than one-third of advanced prostate cancer patients complete their first round of chemotherapy with the disease in control," said Tomasz Beer, MD, director of the prostate cancer program in the Oregon Health & Science University Cancer Institute. "Indefinite chemotherapy is not practical because toxicity and side effects accumulate, so we wanted to find out if a patient can take breaks - or 'holidays' - in chemotherapy and then be retreated with the same chemotherapy."

Beer and his colleagues found that when treatment was restarted after a chemotherapy holiday, roughly three-quarters of study subjects responded again or experienced stabilized prostate-specific androgen (PSA), a protein made only by prostate cells that is monitored to help predict the presence and progression of prostate cancer. The median duration of the first chemotherapy holiday was 16 weeks.

" This was a clinically meaningful break for most of the subjects," Beer said. Prostate cancer is the most common malignancy among men and the second leading cause of cancer death in men in the United States. One in six American men will develop prostate cancer during his lifetime.

Beer presented initial results on intermittent chemotherapy for metastatic prostate cancer from the AIPC Study of Calcitriol Enhancing Taxotere (ASCENT) at the 2006 annual meeting of the American Society for Clinical Oncology.

Communication Tips
For Cancer Patients

There are two parts to verbal communication: speaking and listening.

Learning to listen well is the first, and perhaps most important, step in improving communication. To really hear and understand your partner, you'll need to avoid doing the following:
   –interrupting
   –tuning out
   –judging
   –giving advice

Possibilities:

• Talk/listen to each other about what was hard during the cancer crisis---include feelings
• Talk about what you've missed with each other since the crisis, what you want to bring back into your relationship.


• Do daily check-ins on your thoughts and feelings, or on the relationship, to stay current.
• One of you takes three minutes to share while the partner listens; just listen with interest, to learn more about your partner and to let them feel and be heard.


• Then switch roles. (This is NOT a report of your daily activities; it's telling your partner about YOU).
• Share the "best & hardest" parts of your day at dinner.

• Ask for what you need and want from your partner (they aren't mind readers). If you don't, it will usually lead to feeling resentful or martyred.

Courtesy of Maren Marlin, LCSW

ASCENT is a randomized, double-blinded, placebo-controlled clinical trial to evaluate an innovative formulation of high dose vitamin D (DN-101) given with docetaxel (Taxotere) for advanced prostate cancer research subjects who are no longer responding to hormonal therapy, a condition known as androgen-independent prostate cancer (AIPC). Two hundred fifty subjects participated in the study at 48 sites between September 2002 and January 2004.

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