Do All Men Respond To Hormone Therapy, And How Do Doctors Know My Hormone Therapy Is Working?

March 16, 2009 -- Question: Do all men respond to hormone therapy, and how do doctors know my hormone therapy is working?

Answer: In contrast to many other cancers where there's no certainty about response to a treatment, in nearly all cases men with prostate cancer do respond to hormone therapy. How do we know this? Well, we evaluate response to treatment in a variety of ways. For men who have disease that can be appreciated on a scan, we'll do serial imagining scans. And very reliably hormone therapy will lower the blood test prostate specific antigen or PSA, and this is a routine way that we follow the effectiveness of treatment.