Adjuvant hormonal treatment for prostate cancer: the bicalutamide early prostate cancer program.

Adjuvant hormonal therapy has been demonstrated to be able to delay disease progression in nonmetastatic prostate cancer. To date, however, a favorable impact on survival has only been demonstrated in lymph-node-positive disease and in external-beam radiotherapy series with locally advanced and probably mainly micrometastatic tumors. The Bicalutamide Early Prostate Cancer Program is the largest study under way to define the role of adjuvant treatment in early prostate cancer and identify subgroups of patients likely to benefit from immediate hormonal therapy. At the time of the most recently published analysis, the risk of objective clinical progression was significantly reduced in the bicalutamide arm (hazards ratio 0.58, 95% confidence interval 0.51-0.66, p < 0.0001). However, further maturation of data is needed to see whether this difference will lead to a survival advantage.