Current indications for chemotherapy in prostate cancer patients

Recently, data from two randomized studies, TAX327 and SWOG 9916, which compared docetaxel-based chemotherapy to mitoxantrone-based therapy, have demonstrated that treatment with docetaxel can prolong life in a statistically significant way in patients with hormone refractory prostate cancer (HRPC). In the TAX237 trial the median overall survival rates for patients treated with docetaxel every 3 wk was 18.9 mo, compared with 16.4 mo for the patients in the control arm (p=0.009). Patients treated with the combination of docetaxel and estramustine in the SWOG trial had a significant improvement in median survival (18 mo vs 16 mo, p=0.01), longer progression-free survival (6 mo compared with 3 mo, p<0.0001), and a 20% reduction in the risk of death. The optimal timing of docetaxel-based chemotherapy is still unknown because there are no prospective clinical trials indicating whether earlier treatment is more effective than delayed treatment. There are now increasing options also for second-line therapies in the palliative treatment of HRPC, and ongoing studies on new drugs such as satraplatin and ixabepilone will define the role of these agents in this setting. Preliminary neoadjuvant and adjuvant chemotherapy studies in high-risk prostate cancer patients have demonstrated that these approaches are feasible and do not add morbidity to surgery or radiotherapy, but their impact on survival still needs to be proven in randomized studies.