Finasteride has been shown to prevent prostate cancer in men for up to 16 years

According to an analysis of SWOG clinical trials published in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute (http:// the use of finasteride can prevent prostate cancer in men for up to 16 years, double the previous record A new research strategy makes it possible to combine data published by the national geriatric insurance (http:// with data from clinical trials (http:// (in this study, data is a milestone study conducted by SWOG) The SWOG study, also known as the prostate cancer prevention trial (PCPT), aims to determine whether finasteride, a drug used to treat prostate enlargement and male type hair loss (http:// can prevent prostate cancer in men over 55 years old The study recruited 18882 men between 1993 and 1997 When researchers found that finasteride reduced prostate cancer risk by 25% in 2003, they stopped the experiment Dr Ian Thompson, SWOG leader and health system of Christus Santa Rosa hospital, was the chair of the PCPT study Dr Joseph Unger, a biostatistician and health (http:// service researcher at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center of SWOG, used the data from this study to answer a big question about cancer prevention and treatment With the help of SWOG colleague Dr dawn Hershman, Unger has conducted a series of studies in the past decade using second-hand data, such as national Medicare data for the elderly, U.S census data, National Cancer Institute Surveillance, epidemiology and end result (SEER) project data Using patient information from the PCPT study, Unger linked these patients to information about their participation in healthcare between 1999 and 2011 They were surprised to find that they successfully matched 75% of patients in the PCPT study They created an algorithm to pick out prostate cancer diagnosis information from the national Medicare data for the elderly and detect (http:// changes over time The researchers found that 3244 participants in the PCPT were diagnosed with prostate cancer 16 years later than the control group on average They also found that participants in the PCPT who used finasteride had a 21% lower risk of death from prostate cancer within 16 years.