Prostrate Cancer Treatment Tied To Alzheimer’s Risk (New York Times):
“Hormone therapy, a common treatment for prostate cancer, is associated with an increased risk for Alzheimer’s disease, a new study has found…Overall, those treated with hormone therapy had an 88 percent increased risk of Alzheimer’s compared with other patients. The longer the hormone treatment, the more the risk increased, and patients with at least 12 months of treatment had more than double the risk.”
Study: Androgen Deprivation Therapy and Future Alzheimer’s Disease Risk (Journal of Clinical Oncology). From the abstract:
- Purpose: To test the association of androgen deprivation therapy (ADT) in the treatment of prostate cancer with subsequent Alzheimer’s disease risk.
- Methods: We used a previously validated and implemented text-processing pipeline to analyze electronic medical record data in a retrospective cohort of patients at Stanford University and Mt. Sinai hospitals.…We then tested the effect of ADT on risk of Alzheimer’s disease…
- Results: There were 16,888 individuals with prostate cancer meeting all inclusion and exclusion criteria, with 2,397 (14.2%) receiving ADT…Propensity score and traditional multivariable-adjusted Cox regression analysis both supported a statistically significant association between ADT use and Alzheimer’s disease risk. We also observed a statistically significant increased risk of Alzheimer’s disease with increasing duration of ADT (P = .016).
- Conclusion: Our results support an association between the use of ADT in the treatment of prostate cancer and an increased risk of Alzheimer’s disease in a general population cohort. This study demonstrates the utility of novel methods to analyze electronic medical record data to generate practice-based evidence.
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