It is nice when the title of a medical paper is in the form of a complete sentence and tells the main story of the paper. A new study out of Sweden managed to do just that.
The paper is titled “Androgen deprivation therapy in men with prostate cancer is not associated with COVID-2019 infection.” Covid 2019 in Sweden is what most people in North America now simply call COVID; the disease caused by the SARS-CoV-2 virus.
Early on during the COVID pandemic, there was a lot of discussion about whether prostate cancer (PCa) might increase (or decrease) the risk of getting the infection. There was similar concern about whether treatments for PCa influenced the risk of getting the infection or the severity of it once acquired.
This new paper involved a comparison of 224 PCa patients treated with ADT, 431 PCa patients who had not been treated with ADT, and 240 men diagnosed with just benign prostatic hypertrophy.
The authors found no association between ADT use in prostate cancer patients and subsequent risk of SARS-CoV-2 infection, nor of the severity of the disease for men who caught it. The authors did, however, find that obesity and having type 1 diabetes increased the risk of getting COVID.
This appears to us to be a relatively clean study, but the sample size was not large enough to know whether men who are on ADT and subsequently get diabetes were also at increased risk of severe COVID. That has, though, been reported in other studies.
The take-home messages here is that one should not worry about being at increased risk of getting COVID, if one is on ADT. However, they should be concerned if they’re not taking precaution, while on ADT, to avoid excessive weight gains that get them into the obese range on put them at risk of becoming diabetic.
Reference:
Davidsson, S, Messing Eriksson, A, Udumyan, R, et al. Androgen deprivation therapy in men with prostate cancer is not associated with COVID-2019 infection. Prostate. 2023; 1- 8. doi:10.1002/pros.24485