Bone metastatic pain from prostate cancer

  Bone metastasis is one of the common complications for patients with advanced malignant tumors, especially prostate cancer, breast cancer, lung cancer and thyroid cancer are prone to bone metastasis, mostly osteolytic destruction, which is an important cause of pain caused by tumors. Bone destruction can lead to more serious complications. Such as fracture or spinal cord compression, which aggravate patients’ pain and shorten survival time.  Therefore, inhibiting bone destruction . Therefore, it is important to inhibit bone destruction and relieve patients from bone metastatic pain. Improving the survival quality of patients is an important element in the treatment of advanced tumors. Shi Huaqiu et al. used flutamide combined with bisphosphonates to treat bone metastatic pain in prostate cancer with satisfactory results.  Currently, there are few treatment options for prostate cancer with bone metastases. In order to inhibit tumor progression, the main treatment is palliative endocrine therapy, such as debulking (including pharmacological debulking and surgical debulking) to antagonize androgens that are dependent on tumor progression. The antagonists used are mainly classified into steroidal and non-steroidal.  Flutamide is a non-steroidal androgen antagonist, which can compete with androgens for androgen receptors at the cellular level and block the transport of androgen receptor complexes from the cytoplasm to the nucleus to inhibit the growth of androgen-dependent tumor cells, thus achieving the purpose of inhibiting the growth of prostate cancer, which can better relieve the pain caused by bone metastasis of prostate cancer and play a therapeutic role.  Bisphosphonates are anti-osteolysis agents, which can reverse the progression of osteolysis and significantly improve the quality of survival of patients, and have become the standard treatment for bone pain caused by bone metastases from malignant tumors. Bisphosphonates induce apoptosis and have a direct effect on tumor cells, inhibiting osteoclast-mediated bone resorption, slowing the progression of bone metastases and reducing the tumor burden.  There is much evidence that prostate cancer bone metastases often have osteolytic properties. A group of 78 prostate cancer patients with bone metastases had skeletal bone biopsy data showing that the percentage of bone trabeculae destruction was 27-41% and was consistent with the degree of tumor infiltration.  Studies have shown that in advanced cases of prostate cancer with bone metastases, androgen receptor-positive cancer cells undergo apoptosis due to the lack of androgen stimulation in the early stages of anti-androgen therapy with flutamide tumor size can gradually decrease. As the treatment progresses, some of the androgen receptor positive cells gradually differentiate and transform into androgen receptor negative cells. At this time, the effect of anti-androgen therapy gradually decreases and it becomes difficult to control the development of primary lesions and bone metastases of prostate cancer.  The combination of the two can relieve the pain of bone metastases, make the bone metastases shrink or disappear, reduce the pain of tumor patients and improve the survival quality of tumor patients. The combined application of the two can have a better therapeutic effect on the bone metastatic pain of tumor, and is worthy of clinical promotion and application.