Addition of short-term androgen deprivation therapy to dose-escalated radiation therapy improves failure-free survival for select men with intermediate-risk prostate cancer.

Dose-escalated (DE) radiation therapy (RT) and androgen deprivation therapy (ADT) improve prostate cancer outcomes over standard-dose RT. The benefit of adding ADT to DE-RT for men with intermediate-risk prostate cancer (IR-PrCa) is uncertain.

We identified 636 men treated for IR-PrCa with DE-RT (>75Gy). The adult comorbidity evaluation-27 index classifed comorbidity. Kaplan-Meier and log-rank tests compared failure-free survival (FFS) with and without ADT.

Forty-five percent received DE-RT and 55% DE-RT with ADT (median 6 months). On Cox proportional hazard regression that adjusted for comorbidity and tumor characteristics, ADT improved FFS (adjusted hazard ratio 0.36; P=0.004). Recursive partitioning analysis of men without ADT classified Gleason 4+3=7 or ≥50% positive cores as unfavorable disease. The addition of ADT to DE-RT improved 5-year FFS for men with unfavorable disease (81.6% versus 92.9%; P=0.009) but did not improve FFS for men with favorable disease (96.3% versus 97.4%; P=0.874). When stratified by comorbidity, ADT improved FFS for men with unfavorable disease and no or mild comorbidity (P=0.006) but did not improve FFS for men with unfavorable disease and moderate or severe comorbidity (P=0.380).

The addition of ADT to DE-RT improves FFS for men with unfavorable IR-PrCa, especially those with no or minimal comorbidity.

Annals of oncology : official journal of the European Society for Medical Oncology. 2019 Dec 04 [Epub]

S X Bian, D A Kuban, L B Levy, J Oh, K O Castle, T J Pugh, S Choi, S E McGuire, Q N Nguyen, S J Frank, P L Nguyen, A K Lee, K E Hoffman

Department of Radiation Oncology, The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, Houston; Baylor College of Medicine, Houston., Department of Radiation Oncology, The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, Houston., Department of Internal Medicine, The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, Houston., Department of Radiation Oncology, Dana Farber/Brigham and Women's Cancer Center, Harvard Medical School, Boston, USA., Department of Radiation Oncology, The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, Houston. Electronic address: .