Lifesaving Prostate Cancer Treatment Could Harm Brain

Men who underwent androgen deprivation therapy (ADT) for their prostate cancer had almost twice the risk of Alzheimer’s, when compared to prostate cancer patients who didn’t receive hormone therapy, researchers found.

Men with advanced prostate cancer are often put on what’s called Androgen Deprivation Therapy, or ADT. From this pool, they identified nearly 17,000 patients with prostate cancer that hadn’t spread elsewhere in their bodies, including nearly 2,400 men who had been treated with androgen deprivation therapy.

Ultimately, further studies will be needed to determine whether ADT does increase Alzheimer’s risk.

More recent studies have also linked low testosterone to problems with thinking and memory. So, the researchers made a decision to investigate a possible association between androgen deprivation therapy and the degenerative neurological disease.

The study by Penn University and Stanford University compared the medical records of over five million patients at Californian and NY hospitals.

Several medical specialists also claimed that it does not improve the survival rates for men with localized prostate cancer.

Prostate cancer is the biggest cancer killer in men, after lung cancer.

This is the first research on prostate cancer patients showing a link with testosterone, which is good for the brain, but bad for the prostate. The one who received treatment for over a year showed more than double the risk of an Alzheimer’s diagnosis.

They found that the ADT group had “significantly more Alzheimer’s diagnoses in the years following the initiation of androgen-lowering therapy”. By the most sophisticated measure, members of the ADT group were about 88 percent more likely to get Alzheimer’s during the follow-up period.

They also found a dose-response effect in that the longer the ADT lasted, the higher the likelihood of being diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, to the point where the patients who were on ADT the longest had double the risk of Alzheimer’s than those who did not have ADT.

And the longer men have the treatment, the greater the risk of later being diagnosed with dementia.

Scientists are not yet sure precisely how low testosterone would lead to increased Alzheimer’s risk. Moreover, low testosterone may increase Alzheimer’s risk indirectly, by promoting conditions such as diabetes and atherosclerosis that are known to predispose to Alzheimer’s.

For one thing, androgens appear to keep circulating levels of a protein called beta amyloid low in a person’s bloodstream, said Keith Fargo, director of scientific programs and outreach for the Alzheimer’s Association.

The researchers are planning to look more closely at the link between ADT and Alzheimer’s disease using much larger collections of cancer patient records.