Chemoradiation promising in localized prostate cancer

Main Category: Public Health
Article Date: 31 May 2004 - 10:00 PDT

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In patients with unfavorable localized adenocarcinoma of the prostate, giving docetaxel chemotherapy alongside conformal radiation therapy is well tolerated and merits further investigation, study findings indicate.

Parvesh Kumar (University of Southern California Keck School of Medicine, Los Angeles, California) and colleagues performed a phase I trial to determine the maximal tolerated dose (MTD) of concurrent weekly docetaxel and three-dimensional conformal radiation therapy (70.2 Gy at 1.8 Gy/fraction).

Twenty-two men were recruited into the study. The weekly docetaxel dose started at 5 mg/m2 and was successively escalated to 8, 12, 16, 20, and 25 mg/m2.

The dose-limiting toxicity was grade 3 diarrhea and the MTD of weekly docetaxel was 20 mg/m2, the authors report in the Journal of Clinical Oncology.

Grade 3 diarrhea occurred in the first two patients receiving the 25 mg/m2 dose. The overall incidence of grade 2 diarrhea and grade 2 dysuria was 36% and 23%, respectively.

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