Radiotherapy and short-term androgen deprivation for localized prostate cancer

What Was Tested

This randomized controlled trial paper looks at Leuprolide and Goserelin.

Who Took Part

The study group was 1979 patients.

The age groups tagged for this paper are middle-aged adults, older adults and people over 80, men only.

From 1994 through 2001, the researchers randomly assigned 1979 eligible patients with stage T1b, T1c, T2a, or T2b prostate adenocarcinoma and a prostate-specific antigen (PSA) level of 20 ng per milliliter or less to radiotherapy alone (992 patients) or radiotherapy with 4 months of total androgen suppression starting 2 months before radiotherapy (radiotherapy plus short-term ADT, 987 patients).

How the Study Was Run

The researchers set it up as a randomized study.

Random assignment meant chance, not the researchers, decided who got Leuprolide and who got the comparison, which limits bias.

The primary end point was overall survival.

What Was Measured

Topics PubMed links to this paper include Androgen Antagonists, Antineoplastic Combined Chemotherapy Protocols, Combined Modality Therapy, Erectile Dysfunction, Flutamide, Gonadotropin-Releasing Hormone and Goserelin.

What This Means in Plain Language

The paper is a randomized study of Leuprolide and Goserelin in 1979 patients.

With several hundred people or more, it is a fairly large study for this kind of research.

The abstract goes on to report its results in about 10 sentences; this page does not restate them, so read the paper for the findings and their limits.

The publication is from 2011 (The New England journal of medicine), a journal based in United States.

More context: the Leuprolide compound page and the Goserelin compound page.