Prostate cancer drug raises heart, diabetes risk

WASHINGTON, Sep 20 (Reuters) Hormone therapy used to treat prostate cancer that has already spread may save patients from cancer but raise the risk of diabetes and heart disease, US researchers reported.

They said yesterday doctors need to monitor such men closely to makesure they do not trade one cause of death for another.

''Men with prostate cancer have high five-year survival rates, but they also have higher rates of noncancer mortality than healthy men,'' Dr Nancy Keating, an assistant professor of health care policy and medicine at Harvard Medical School, who led the study, said in a statement.

''This study shows that a common hormonal treatment for prostate cancer may put men at significant risk for other serious diseases.

Patients and physicians need to be aware of the elevated risk as they make treatment decisions.'' Writing in the Journal of Clinical Oncology, Keating and colleagues said they examined the records of 73,000 men age 66 or older who were diagnosed with local or regional prostate cancer.

Men with early prostate cancer can be treated surgically, with radiation or with radioactive seeds implanted carefully around the prostate.

If the cancer has spread, they are often treated to block production of the hormone testosterone, which can fuel prostate cancer.

This is done either by removal of the testes, or more commonly, by regular injections of a gonadotropin-releasing hormone or GnRH agonist drug.

''Our study found that men with local or regional prostate cancer receiving a GnRH agonist had a 44 percent higher risk of developing diabetes and a 16 percent higher risk of developing coronary heart disease than men who were not receiving hormone therapy,'' Keating said.

''For men who do require this treatment, physicians may want to talk with their patients about strategies, such as exercise and weight loss, which may help to lower risk of diabetes and heart disease,'' Dr. Matthew Smith of Massachusetts General Hospital said in a statement.

Prostate cancer is the most common cancer among men, with more than 234,000 new cases diagnosed in the United States every year.

It will kill 27,350 this year, according to the American Cancer Society.

The Prostate Cancer Coalition released a report showing that deaths from prostate cancer have fallen by 32.5 percent in ten years in the United States.

It said the mortality rate for black men is the lowest since 1977, but it is still 2.36 times the rate for white men.

The mortality rate was 39.34 per 100,000 in 1993 and dropped to 26.55 per 100,000 in 2003, mostly due to better screening but also because of better treatments, according to the coalition and the American Cancer Society.

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