Studies conducted by researchers over the last couple of years have shown that hormone therapy for prostate cancer patients can increase the risk of having a heart attack and the one of developing diabetes as well.

Recently, during a meeting of the American Society for Therapeutic Radiology and Oncology that was held Tuesday in Boston, Amy Dosoretz, a resident in the Harvard Radiation Oncology Program, presented a paper that revealed there was no proof that hormones had beneficial effects in patients with slow-growing tumors.

The study looked at 1,707 prostate cancer patients and found that men over 70 who had been given hormones before having had their seed implants were at a 20% higher risk of death than those who had only been treated with implants. Five years after having received the treatment, 19.1% of the men who had undergone hormone therapy died, while in the latter group, the death toll raised to 16.6%. Research showed that the results did not apply to patients under the age of seventy. All the prostate cancer patients in the study received the hormone treatment for a period of three and a half months.

Prostate cancer occurs when cells of the prostate, which is a gland in the male reproductive system, mutate and begin to multiply out of control. The disease is more frequent in men over the age of fifty. Hormonal therapy blocks prostate cancer cells from getting dihydrotestosterone (DHT), which is a hormone that enables the spreading of the cancer cells. It rarely cures the cancer, but it can cause the tumor to stop growing or to shrink.