CHICAGO — A hormone-blocking pill approved last year for some men with advanced prostate cancer now also seems to help a wider group of men who were given it sooner in the course of treating their disease.
In a study of nearly 1,100 such men, Johnson & Johnson’s Zytiga doubled the time patients lived without their cancer getting worse.
The drug also seems to be improving survival, but it will take longer follow-up to know for sure. Independent monitors stopped the study once it was clear the drug was helping and let men who had been getting dummy pills switch to Zytiga. At that point — after a median treatment time of two years — 34 percent of men on dummy pills had died versus 27 percent of those taking Zytiga.
“Our hope is that this can become a new option” for up to 30,000 men each year in the United States, said study leader Dr. Charles Ryan of the University of California, San Francisco.
He gave results Saturday at a meeting in Chicago of the American Society of Clinical Oncology. The Associated Press
