Cyclic BAT
G’day comrades.
Some of us have been following the development of Bipolar Androgen Therapies (BAT), sometimes in combination with other new treatments, sometimes as a serial treatment. Common or garden variety BAT starts when antiandrogen treatment (enza, abi, or in my case bialutamide) fails, then stop taking the antiandrogen but keep up with primary ADT, then every month take an intramuscular dose of T, continue until PSA is back in a rising trend, then rechallenge with the previously failed antiandrogen. Responses vary but an average rule of thumb is that this will about double the time the antiandrogen works. Both Patrick and I have asked whether this is repeatable and under what conditions. We have both come to a conclusion that the sooner one starts the better (perhaps even along with the initial primary ADT) and that is better to regularly cycle the treatments (BAT and antiandrogen) rather than continue each of them to failure. Eg in my case I now take bicalutamide for 2 months, stop for a month and then take my BAT dose and restart the bical about 2 weeks later, rinse and repeat. I don’t currently have enough data to say this cyclic version works long term but all up I have extended the use of bical from 1 year failure to about another 3 years using the old style BAT and more recently my cyclic version. PSA bounces around a bit but has generally cycled from 1 to 5. I take a PSMA scan shortly that will tell me more. However the idea that BAT may be able to be cycled for relatively long periods of time seems to be gaining currency among the early proponents of BAT such as the groups around Johns Hopkins and Sam Denmeade. These are 2 reports of that rethinking.