Lupron Is Not Scary - But What Is Scary Is

[gusgold]

Guys here write about being scared to go on Lupron, then all the replies come in from guys who have been on Lupron for years...no Lupron is not scary...what is scary is that after a 60 year war on cancer, a drug that was approved in 1985 is still the primary treatment First Huggins then Dr. Nalakrtas protocol of raw Gator liver + Hippopotamus urine + Tasmanian Devil Testicles. Dr. Nalakrats protocol works. I had no real problem with going to Africa and obtaining the Gator liver and Hippo urine but when I got to Tasmania it took me 3 weeks to catch a Devil.

Gus

[Hidden]

Great point about Lupron. I keep hearing about all of these advancements in drug therapies for pca, and while have been some, I tend to think it's more about early detection via genomics, scans, MRI image-driven biopsies, etc that is helping more. I am hopeful though that immunotherapy-based treatments will yield breakthroughs.

[pjoshea13]

Gus wrote:

"what is scary is that after a 60 year war on cancer, a drug that was approved in 1985 is still the primary treatment"

It's worse than that!

Diethylstilbestrol [DES] was the standard treatment from 1941 to 1985, when "the GnRH agonist leuprolide was found to have efficacy similar to DES without estrogenic effects ..." [1]

So Lupron was viewed sort of as a safer DES. Same target. Same limitations. A safety improvement on a lousy therapy.

The basic treatment has been in effect since before many of us were born. It remains a palliative treatment.

Not only that, but Zytiga, Xtandi & the like are merely ADT add-ons, & fail in the same way.

Huggins got the Nobel for discovering that ADT could be used to treat PCa. However, in 1941, the male mortality tables looked quite different from today. Today, you have to be unlucky not to get to age 65, and those who attain 65 in good health can expect another 25 years or more.

In Huggins day (pre-screening), patients were older, with fewer years left on the life tables. ADT could keep many alive until they died of something else.

But today, many men start ADT at an age when they would otherwise expect to live another 25-30 years. The concept is showing its age.

-Patrick

[1] en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dieth...

[Dr_WHO]

I am going to sound like a broken record but there has been a major advancement for men that have advanced cancer and have had less than two years of Lupron. Last month the results from a lot of studies came out showing that using Lupron and Zytiga at the start of treatment and extend life and push back PSA increase more than the standard of only using Zytiga when Lupron fails. A week after my medical oncologist returned from a conference she added Zytiga to the Lupron treatment that I have been on for a year. A link to one of many articles is listed below

nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/N...