Once we become hormone refractory (HRPC) there remains only one approved drug to treat our prostate cancer, docetaxel. As with hormone therapy (ADT) docetaxel also stops working after a period. There have been different strategies used to try to deal with this untenable situation, including the use of docetaxel on an intermittent schedule.
A recent study at Klinik für Urologie und Kinderurologie, Philipps-Universität Marbur was designed to reevaluate both the toxicity and efficacy of intermittent -docetaxel-chemotherapy in patients whose cancers progressed after successful first-line docetaxel therapy.
Forty six (46), eighteen (18) , and five (5) patients with HRPC received one (1), two (2), or three (3) cycles of docetaxel based chemotherapy. Both the toxicity of the docetaxel as well as the PSA response and general conditions were evaluated systematically. SPSS 15.0 was applied for statistic analysis.
Fifty six (56 %) patients achieved a PSA response of > 50 %, another ten (22 %) patients of up to 50 %; and ten (22 %) patients progressed despite the reintroduction of the docetaxel. The median overall survival of