Intermittent Hormone Therapy (IHT): How is it working for you?
I thought it is a good idea to have separate thread on Intermittent Hormone Therapy(IHT), so we can all learn from other's experiences.
Who in here are currently on IHT and if you are, please share about your disease specifics and how it is working out for you as much as you can.
Interested in more discussions like this? Go to the Prostate Cancer Support Group.
Here is a link to an article( not the article Dr Schulz referring to):
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7654677/
Very interesting and has a lot of data over time. In a nutshell, once your PSA is less than .2, the author says you can try intermittent ADT, but only if you have no metastases.
You can do this cycle several times, but some cases become castrate resistant because of IADT so there is that risk.
I guess you would have to go off ADT and then see how long it takes for your PSA to rise. Rise to WHAT is the real issue. The author mentions a PSA of 3 (as opposed to the original level of 6) but I would personally be freaked out if my PSA went from .2 to 3 in less than 18 months. Don’t even ask me where I got that number - it just seems like a reasonable amount of time to watch your PSA go up by an order of FIFTEEN times from its lowest value before you go back on ADT. That scenario would not bode well for future cycling. However, if it took 5 YEARS to reach 3, that would indicate a fairly low aggressive PCa cell and a more favorable environment to repeat the cycle. It’s a process, that’s for sure….Just my two cents!
That is a great summary of the article! Dr Schulz says when your PSA reached a predetermined level, say a level of 2, you go back on ADT after PSAMA/PET scan.