Health Experts Trying To Ease Restrictions On Prostate Cancer Drugs
In the UK, cancer experts are hoping that their pleas to the NHS will result in the easing of restrictions on prostate cancer drugs. The NHS decides how to ration medicines in the UK, and the regulatory body has decided that they won’t provide certain prostate cancer drugs to men with advanced forms of the disease. Although the drug xtandi had success in extending the lives of prostate cancer patients an average of five months in clinical trials, it is not always available to patients. The NHS restrictions only allow the drug to be funded and provided to patients if they haven’t already been treated with another prostate cancer drug, abiraterone.
Health advocates believe that the NHS rules are unfair, and that doctors should be able to choose between xtandi and abiraterone based on their patients’ medical conditions. The leaders of multiple prostate cancer research centers and health advocates wrote a letter to the UK paper The Telegraph in which they were heavily critical of the NHS decision. Prostate Cancer UK, the Institute of Cancer Research, Movember UK, and Tackle Prostate Cancer were all involved in the letter, which read, “This illogical decision has been made with a lack of transparency and puts a huge burden on clinicians to choose one treatment over the other without knowing which would most benefit the man.”
While health advocacy experts claim that NHS rules will limit access to xtandi, the NHS has stated that it believes that its new regulations improve on previous ones and will create greater overall access to prostate cancer drugs.
Source: