(WXYZ) — In today’s Health Alert, new research shows that an easy blood test could help doctors decide on the best way to treat patients with advanced prostate cancer. It can also predict who might live the longest.
When prostate cancer is caught early, it can often be treated successfully with surgery or radiation. But once the cancer metastasizes, it can’t be cured. Metastatic prostate cancer is an advanced stage and means that the cancer cells have spread beyond the prostate gland into other parts of the body. This makes it harder to treat and often requires aggressive therapies.
Until now, there hasn’t been a reliable way to predict how men with advanced prostate cancer would respond to treatment. Or whether they should stick with standard treatment care or try riskier new drug trials.
This new research, which is part of a Phase III clinical trial, found that measuring circulating tumor cells, or CTCs, is not only an effective way to predict treatment response but also survival chances. CTCs are rare cancer cells that break away from tumors and enter the bloodstream.
Now, the researchers used a blood test called CellSearch, which is already available.
They analyzed blood samples from 503 patients with metastatic prostate cancer who were taking part in a drug trial. And here’s what they found:
Patients with five or more CTCs faced the poorest outcomes. They were more than three times more likely to die during the study than those who had zero CTCs in their blood. They were nearly 2.5 times more likely to see cancer progress. And they were more likely to have a poorer response to treatment.
On average, men with five or more CTCs lived 27.9 months after their blood test, while those with one to four CTCs lived about 56.2 months. And men with no CTCs lived at least 78 months.
The key takeaway - is that a higher number of CTCs indicates the cancer will progress much more quickly, treatment is less effective, and survival time is shorter.
While this may sound alarming, the test can help identify men early who may benefit from new and possibly stronger treatments — and hopefully extend their lives.
