In North America, surgeons do not typically pre-treat patients scheduled for a prostatectomy with ADT, but things are different in Goyang, South Korea. There, surgeons may treat patients with a positive biopsy to ≥3 months of ADT before surgery.
In the pathological analysis of the excised gland from 111 men, who had ADT before their surgery, six were found to have what would formally be called stage pT0 disease. What that means is that no evidence of prostate cancer could be found in their prostate gland removed at surgery.
Those men were followed for a median of 59 months and they showed no signs of the disease. The authors review the few other published accounts of pTO disease. It would be nice to know more about the genetics of these men and what else contributed to their good fortune.
Joung JY, Kim JE, Kim SH, Seo HK, Chung J, Park WS, Hong EK, Lee KH. 2015. The prevalence and outcomes of pT0 disease after neoadjuvant hormonal therapy and radical prostatectomy in high-risk prostate cancer. BMC Urol 15(1):82. www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26269129