Subset analysis of RTOG 85-31 and 86-10 indicates an advantage for long-term vs. short-term adjuvant hormones for patients with locally advanced nonmetastatic prostate cancer treated with radiation therapy.

What Was Tested

The paper reports a study of Goserelin, published as a randomized controlled trial.

Who Took Part

The study group was 31 patients.

PubMed tags the participants as men only.

Nine hundred ninety-three eligible patients from RTOG 85-31 and 86-10 treated between 1987-1992 were included in this study.

Five hundred seventy-five patients with T3N0M0 disease were included from RTOG 85-31 and 418 patients with T2b-T4N0M0 disease from RTOG 86-10.

How the Study Was Run

In design terms this was a randomized study.

The patients were allocated by chance, so the Goserelin group and the comparison group should start out alike.

Patients randomized to receive long-term hormones (LTH) on 85-31 received goserelin starting the last week of RT and continued indefinitely.

Patients treated with short-term hormones (STH) on 86-10 received goserelin and flutamide 2 months prior to and during RT.

The median follow-up for all patients in this analysis was 71 months (range, 0.6-129 months).

What Was Measured

The subject headings attached to it are Antineoplastic Agents, Hormonal, Chemotherapy, Adjuvant, Goserelin, Proportional Hazards Models, Prostatic Neoplasms and Treatment Failure.

What This Means in Plain Language

The paper is a randomized study of Goserelin in 31 patients.

With fewer than 40 people, it is a small study, so it is better read as an early signal for further research than as a settled answer.

Results are reported in around 6 sentences of the abstract; we leave them to the paper itself rather than summarise them.

The publication is from 2001 (International journal of radiation oncology, biology, physics), a journal based in United States.

More context: the related Goserelin library page, all human trials.