Common Prostate Cancer Treatment May Double Alzheimer's Risk

Dec 10, 2015 12:03 PM EST

(Photo : Photo by Ariana Lindquist / Bloomberg via Getty Images file) Radiologist Val J. Lowe, director of the cancer imaging program at the Mayo Clinic cancer center, looks at prostate cancer scans.

Androgen deprivation therapy (ADT) is one of the primary methods of treating prostate cancer because the role testosterone plays in tumor growth. New research shows a new treatment that also doubles the risk for a diagnosis of Alzheimer's disease.

Since 1940s, ADT has been used to lower testosterone and other androgens in cancer patients. About 500,000 men in the United States are currently being treated with it. Previous research has shown lower levels of testosterone can also increase the risk for cognitive impairment and the development of Alzheimer's disease that leads researchers to call for a new study to conduct in the association.

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"It's hard to determine the precise amount of increased risk in just one study and important to note that this study does not prove causation," said by Dr. Kevin Nead, a resident in the radiation oncology department in the Perelmen School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania,

Based on the Medical Standford Education, the researchers had scanned the records of about 5.5 million patients from two hospitals in Stanford Health Care in Palo Alto, through a institutional research agreement of about 3.7 million patients from Mount Sinai Hospital, in New York City. Among this adherent, they identified about 9,000 prostate patients at each institution, 16,888 of them had non-metastatic prostate cancer and a total of 2,397 had been treated with androgen deprivation therapy.

According to UPI, patients treated with ADT were 1.88 times as likely to receive an Alzheimer's disease diagnosis over a median follow up of 2.7 years after the conclusion of the disease. A subset of men treated with ADT for longer than 12 months were 2.12 times as likely as patients who did not receive ADT to be diagnosed with Alzheimer's. It is more than a double of prostate cancer patients that are not treated with ADT.

According to Dr. Nead in one of his presscon, "But considering the already-high prevalence of Alzheimer's disease in older men, any increased risk would have significant public health implications."

Tagsprostate cancer, Cancer treatment, Androgen deprivation therapy, Health advantages, Health Risks