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 Original Articles |
| Pain Relief and Quality-of-Life Assessment Following Combined Chemotherapy with Mitoxantrone and Prednisone for Hormone-Refractory Prostate Cancer |
| Hong-Woo Rhee, Ji-Yeol Lee, Sae Woong Kim, Chung-Bum Lee, Sung Hak Kang, Yong-Hyun Cho, Tae-Kon Hwang, Wong Hyun Park, Moon Soo Yoon |
| Department of Urology, College of Medicine, The Catholic University of Korea |
Vol.18 Num.3 (p325~334)
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Background : There is no evidence that therapeutic modalities prolong the survival of patients with hormone-refractory prostate cancer nowadays. The main goal of treatment is therefore improvement in quality-of-life including palliation of symptoms.
We performed this study to investigate the benefit of mitoxantrone and prednisone chemotherapy in patients with symptomatic hormone-refractory prostate cancer using relevant end points of palliation regarding to pain and quality-of-life.
Methods : From July 1998 to December 1999, we assessed the 18 patients with symptomatic hormone-refractory prostate cancer receiving mitoxantrone and low dose prednisone. The treatment end point was a palliative response defined as a 2-point decrease in pain assessed by a 6-point pain scale complemented by patients (or complete loss of pain if initially 1+) without an increase in analgesic medication and maintained for two consecutive evaluations at least 3 weeks apart.
Health-related quality-of-life was evaluated with a series of linear analogue self-assessment(LASA) scale of the Prostate Cancer-Specific Quality-of-Life Instrument(PROSQOLI) and performance status was also measured.
Results : Palliative responses were observed in 12(66.7%) of 18 patients. The duration of palliative responses were 4.2±3.6 months(range: 2 to 10 months). Treatment was well tolerated without specific side effects. There were no differences in prostate-specific antigen(PSA) level following treatment and no significant changes of radiologic findings evaluated by bone scan and/or CT were noted except 2 cases after chemotherapy. All the responding patients had an improvement in quality-of-life scales and performance status, however serum PSA levels were not changed.
Conclusions: Chemotherapy with mitoxantrone and prednisone provides palliation and an improvement in quality-of-life for more than half(66.7%) of the patients with symptomatic hormone-refractory prostate cancer.
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Keywords : Hormone-refractory prostate cancer, Mitoxantrone, Quality-of-life |
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