A 3‐year follow‐up of patients with localized prostate cancer operated on with or without pre‐treatment with the GnRH‐agonist triptorelin

Objective To examine the effect of pre-operative androgen deprivation on the progression rate of malignancy in patients operated on for localized prostate cancer. Patients and methods A total of 53 patients received no hormone therapy (group 1) and a further 38 patients (group 2) received the generic releasing-hormone agonist triptorelin during the 3 months before surgery. The patients in group 1 had T1b-T2 tumours, whereas 12 of those in group 2 had clinical stage T3 tumours. Despite this, the surgical specimens from the patients in group 2 showed a rate of cancer invasion of the surgical margins 20% lower than those from the patients in group 1. After prostatectomy, the patients were followed for 3 years by repeated analyses of prostate-specific antigen (PSA) in serum. Results During the follow-up, the PSA level exceeded the upper threshold (0.6 ng/mL) in 16 % of the patients in group 1 and in 43 % of those in group 2 (P 0.05), developed symptoms from skeletal metastases. Conclusion There was no evidence that pre-operative hormone therapy slowed the progression of prostate cancer.