Some prostate cancer patients may improve their long-term survival chances by receiving hormone suppression drugs such as Abbott Laboratories’ Lupron and AstraZeneca Plc’s Zoladex with radiation therapy, a study showed. The research found that men who received radiation and the drugs, called androgen deprivation therapy, increased their survival rates a decade later to 62 percent compared with 57 percent for those who didn’t get the medicines. The risk of death from prostate cancer declined to 4 percent for patients with the combination treatment from 8 percent for those receiving radiation alone, according to the report released today by the New England Journal of Medicine.
