Dr. Martin Schoen of St. Louis University and the St. Louis VA Medical Center led a recently published study showing that over the past 20 years, patients diagnosed with metastatic prostate cancer are living longer.
Many new medicines for advanced prostate cancer have been developed over the past 2 decades. Dr. Schoen notes that we see that these drugs have prolonged survival in clinical trials, but his team wanted to understand whether this was also true for the average patient being treated in the “real world.”
The researchers used data from the VA and from the SEER database, which includes patients with cancer from across the country. In both groups of patients, survival increased from 2000-2004 through 2015-2019. The effect was most pronounced in younger patients (ages 50-59).
Dr. Schoen, himself a Veteran, attributes this positive trend to the development of the new medicines, as well as to improvements in imaging. He encourages patients remain hopeful and to discuss their treatment options with their doctor: “People shouldn’t think of this [disease] as something that we can’t do anything about….. there is not only hope, but there also possibly are cures.”
The study was supported in part by by Dr. Schoen’s PCF VAlor Young Investigator Award. Read the full article here.
