HRT patches provide new treatment for prostate cancer

Hormone replacement therapy (HRT) patches used by women to relieve the symptoms of menopause are being employed to help men with advanced prostate cancer avoid disfiguring surgery.

Researchers at Hammersmith Hospital and Imperial College have discovered that use of the patches offers a kinder alternative to the radical treatments, including castration, currently used to halt spread of the disease. Prostate cancer is now the most common male cancer, excluding ordinary (non-melanoma) skin cancer, with 24,000 new cases a year.

A preliminary study of 20 patients with advanced disease found they enjoyed a far better quality of life using the patches, their tumours regressed and their bone density improved.

Paul Abel of Hammersmith Hospital said: "The idea behind hormone therapy of prostate tumours is to cut the supply of the male hormone testosterone, which can encourage cancer cell growth. Currently, many men are given drugs which reduce testosterone – some even have their testicles removed to achieve the same effect.

"However, the side-effects of these therapies can be severe – many men suffer menopausalsymptoms such as hot flushes, osteoporosis, and other distressing effects such as impotence and breast growth."

Doctors have long known that giving the female hormone oestrogen can halt testosterone production but trials using oestrogen tablets have been abandoned because of an increased risk of blood clotting, causing deep vein thrombosis or a potentially fatal pulmonary embolism when a blood clot becomes lodged in the lungs.

But the Hammersmith researchers say the HRT patches have been far more successful, with few side-effects. Their findings are published in the Journal of Urology.

Mr Abel said: "We're delighted with the results of this preliminary study. It holds real promise for prostate cancer sufferers, giving an efficient, easy and cost-effective alternative to the currently available therapies, which can be painful, time-consuming and produce unwelcome side-effects.

"The beauty of patch therapy is that it not only leads to disease regression, it does so with far fewer side-effects. It is also flexible in that it can be removed at any time if necessary, for example should side-effects develop."

The patch therapy is also widely available and costs one-tenth of current treatments.

* Women who take regular doses of over-the-counter painkillers such as aspirin and ibuprofen may reduce their risk of breast cancer by a fifth, researchers have found.

A study of 80,000 American women who took two or more doses of the painkillers each week for between five and nine years had a 21 per cent lower chance of developing breast cancer. The findings applied only to non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs, of which aspirin and ibuprofen are the best-known examples. They did not apply to paracetamol and codeine, which are a different class of painkiller. However, doctors who reported the findings in the Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the American Association for Cancer Research advised women not to start taking painkillers regularly to ward off cancer because they can have other side-effects.