HRT Patches Could Treat Prostate Cancer

Oestrogen skin patches used to control menopausal symptoms in women may provide a safe alternative therapy for prostate cancer, research has shown.

Hormone replacement therapy (HRT) patches prevent the growth of prostate tumours by drastically lowering levels of testosterone.

Prostate cancer that is starting to spread is known to be fuelled by the male hormone.

Current treatments include injected drugs called LHRH agonists, such as Zoladex, which interfere with testosterone production, resulting in chemical castration.

However, they can have serious long-term side effects, including the bone thinning disease osteoporosis and diabetes.

Oestrogen - the female sex hormone - taken in a pill form also blocks testosterone production, but can lead to dangerous blood clots and strokes.

Did you read about these breakthroughs last year?

This year, the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force recommended against routine prostate cancer screening for men of all ages, noting its small benefits compared to the harms, published in the Annals of Internal Medicine. "We think the benefit is very small," Dr. Michael LeFevre, a member of the task force, told NPR's Shots blog. "Our range is between zero and one prostate cancer death avoided for every thousand men screened," which is minuscule compared to lives saved for screenings for conditions like colorectal cancer. A study published at the beginning of the year in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute seemed to back up the recommendations, noting that routine prostate cancer screening didn't seem to make a difference in the risk of dying from prostate cancer, Reuters reported. However, the American Society of Clinical Oncology issued advice after the USPSTF's recommendation, saying that whether a man gets routine prostate cancer screening should depend on his life expectancy. For example, men who aren't expected to live more than another 10 years should be discouraged from PSA testing, the Associated Press reported.

To add more to the research on prostate cancer screening, a study in the journal Cancer showed that routine PSA testing is linked with 17,000 fewer cases of the deadliest form of prostate cancer. "By not using PSA tests in the vast majority of men, you have to accept you are going to increase very serious metastatic disease threefold," study researcher Dr. Edward Messing, M.D., the chief of urology at the University of Rochester Medical Center, told WebMD. Specifically, researchers calculated that without routine prostate cancer screenings through PSA testing, 25,000 men would have been diagnosed with metastatic prostate cancer (a deadly form of prostate cancer where it has spread beyond the prostate to elsewhere in the body) in 2008, compared with the 8,000 who were actually diagnosed with metastatic prostate cancer that year, WebMD reported.

Working the night shift is associated with a 2.77-times increased risk of prostate cancer, according to a study in the American Journal of Epidemiology. The study, conducted by Canadian researchers included 3,137 men with cancer and 512 men without cancer. The researchers also found that working the night shift raised the risk of lung, colon, bladder, rectal and pancreatic cancers, as well as non-Hodgkin's lymphoma.

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HRT Patches Could Treat Prostate Cancer