In North America the current opinion is that there is little difference in cancer control or disease progression associated with ADT administered either continuously or intermittently. However, this study out of Korea arrives at a different conclusion. Based on 175 patients on continuous ADT and 428 on intermittent ADT, the authors reported that those in the intermittent group had a significantly longer median time to disease progression.
The two groups were not identical in terms of Gleason scores at baseline and the continuous ADT group was relatively small. The study suggests to us that there may be racial difference in response to ADT for East Asians versus Caucasians…a point not mentioned by the authors of the paper.
Ku JY, Lee JZ, Ha HK. 2015. The effect of continuous androgen deprivation treatment on prostate cancer patients as compared with intermittent androgen deprivation treatment. Korean J Urol 56(10):689-694. www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26495069