Hormone Therapy for Prostate Cancer Ups Kidney Cancer Risk

Men undergoing hormone therapy for prostate cancer have higher risk of developing kidney cancer, according to a new study.

The therapy called androgen deprivation therapy aims at reducing the androgen hormones that are known to accelerate prostate cancer. The therapy is usually given to people who have advanced prostate cancer, but it is now even given to men who have less severe forms of cancer.

"There is a big debate over who should receive androgen deprivation therapy, and the timing of use. In patients whose prostate cancer has spread, the benefits outweigh the risk, but now there's this jump to using [androgen deprivation therapy] in patients who would not typically die from prostate cancer. In that subgroup of patients, the risks might outweigh the benefit," said Laurent Azoulay, a pharmacoepidemiologist at Jewish General Hospital's Lady Davis Institute, in Montreal and one of the study authors, according to WebMD.

The side-effects of this therapy are serious as "... the testosterone suppression associated with this therapy may lead to a hypogonadal condition that can have detrimental effects on renal function, thus raising the hypothesis that ADT-induced hypogonadism could potentially lead to acute kidney injury (AKI)," according to the background information of the study.

The study was based on data collected from 10,250 men diagnosed with nonmetastatic prostate cancer, who were followed for about 4 years. Researchers found that 232 patients who had developed AKI during the study period.

The study showed that prostate cancer patients who were given ADT had 2.5 times higher chance of developing kidney cancer than patients who weren't put on ADT.

"To our knowledge, this is the first population-based study to investigate the association between the use of ADT and the risk of AKI in men with prostate cancer. In this study, the use of ADT was associated with an increased risk of AKI, with variations observed with certain types of ADTs. This association remained continuously elevated, with the highest odds ratio observed in the first year of treatment. Overall, these results remained consistent after conducting several sensitivity analyses," the authors wrote in the journal.

The study is published in the journal JAMA.

Prostate cancer occurs in tissues of prostate- a gland that is present below the bladder and in front of the rectum in men. National Cancer Institute says that, an estimated 238590 new cases will be diagnosed and about 29,720 men will die from the cancer in the U.S. this year.