As a general rule of medicine, patients suffering from cancer live with the uncertainty of a possible regression of their deadly disease no matter how successful the initial treatment was. The abnormal cellular multiplication of a tissue or organ of the human body tends to be difficult to contain.
Some men suffering from prostate cancer are condemned to a state of perennial nervousness because the cancer cells that have proliferated in their organism seem to be paralyzed, without being able to spread to other parts, but without responding more to treatment. Unfortunately, many of them will develop an incurable process of metastasis, which will result in their deaths.
New scientific studies, whose findings were presented this week during an annual event organized by the American Society of Clinical Oncology in San Francisco, have offered some worth to these terminal patients: more time on their biological clock.
Two independent teams of researchers tested their respective medications on patients whose dormant prostate cancers seemed to be about to spread and become metastatic. Previous to this, the patients received their standard treatment and still followed with the hormonal therapies that reduced their levels of testosterone, a necessary form of chemical castration because this hormone stimulates the carcinogenic growth.
Each of the medical trials randomly assigned its volunteers to receive the drug or a placebo: around 2,600 patients participated worldwide. In both tests, those who consumed the medication increased their life expectancy more compared to those who took the placebo.
The people who were given the experimental drug apalutamide lived a median of 40 additional months before succumbing to the metastasis of their cancer, surviving two years longer than the placebo group. The patients who took enzalutamide also experienced something similar, lived a median of 36 months without metastatic cancer.