More articles on hormones

Research suggests hormone therapy may lead to more deadly prostate cancer.

WebMD (8/28, DeNoon) reported, "Hormone therapy, the most common treatment for advanced prostate cancer, can boomerang to make the cancer more deadly, mouse studies" published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences suggest. WebMD explained that doctors use hormone therapy...to shut off these tumor-promoting androgens" as "it's well known that male sex hormones promote the growth of prostate cancer." Study author Edward M. Messing, M.D., said, "The androgen receptor in the stromal cells always turns the cancer on. ... The androgen receptor in the epithelial cells, at least in the animal models we studied, tends to inhibit cancer." Messing noted that this "helps explain why hormone therapy always works at first but then tends to lose its cancer-inhibiting effect over time." During the study, researchers "demonstrated the opposite effects of androgen receptors in cell-culture studies and in studies of prostate-cancer-prone mice that lacked androgen receptors only in their prostate epithelial cells. These mice had much more aggressive cancer, apparently because they lost the ability to respond to the cancer-inhibiting effects of androgens."

Prostate Cancer Patients Treated With Hormone Therapy May Have Higher Risk Of Developing A Blood Clot.

The AP (4/14) reports that "men with prostate cancer being treated with hormone therapy have a slightly higher risk of developing a blood clot," according to a study published in The Lancet Oncology. The UK's Daily Mail (4/14) reports that researchers "looked at more than 76,000 Swedish patients who had received curative treatment, or hormone therapy, or were being monitored without treatment." All patients "were found to be at higher risk of blood clotting than men in the general population." The UK's Press Association (4/14) reports that "men undergoing hormone therapy were two-and-a-half times more likely than average to suffer a DVT and nearly twice as much at risk of a pulmonary embolism." The researchers found that the "increased risk was especially high for younger men with advanced disease."