Patients with incurable advanced prostate cancer are not as helpless to doctors as other malignancies.
All-androgen blockade therapy
Because prostate cancer is often androgen-dependent at the beginning, treatment can be achieved with total androgen blockade.
Doctors often use debulking, which is further divided into surgical debulking and pharmacological debulking, to treat the disease.
Surgical debulking is the removal of both testes, and pharmacological debulking is the regular subcutaneous injection of a luteinizing hormone-releasing hormone analogue. This is combined with oral androgen receptor blockers to achieve total androgen blockade to treat patients with advanced prostate cancer.
Combined with radiation therapy
Alloandrogen blockade therapy can be combined with radiation therapy.
Radiotherapy can affect cells that are actively dividing, that is, tumor cells, by destroying components of the DNA, and can directly kill or at least control the growth of tumors in the prostate.
What we’re talking about here is external radiation therapy.
This radiation therapy is painless, non-invasive, and a very popular treatment for prostate cancer. Roughly 20% of prostate cancer patients receive external radiation therapy each year.