Prostate cancer therapy linked to brittle bones

Hormone-suppressing drugs, increasingly used to treat prostate cancer, make men so prone to broken bones that the risks of the treatment may outweigh the benefits in those whose cancer was caught early.

Researchers at the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston found that in the five years after prostate cancer was diagnosed, men taking drugs such as Lupron had a 20% risk of fracture, versus 13% among those not taking the treatment.

Although prostate cancer kills about 30,000 American men a year, it generally grows slowly and most patients die of some other cause before the cancer can kill them.

But a broken bone can prove lethal. For elderly people, a serious fracture often starts a downward spiral of slow-healing infections and other complications, confinement to a nursing home or hospital bed, and eventually death. One-third of elderly men who break their hips die of complications within a year.

The study, led by Dr. Vahakn Shahinian, an assistant professor of internal medicine, reviewed health records of 50,613 men with prostate cancer, age 66 or older, from national databases on cancer and Medicare patients.

The researchers blamed hormone-suppressing drugs for an estimated 3,000 fractures a year in Americans with prostate cancer, the second-most common cancer among men. The study was reported in the Jan. 13 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine.