Another ADT question

Didn't want to hijack the other Richard's thread, but it's nudged me to post my own question.

I'm nearing the end of my second 3-month Eligard. My RO has wanted me to do at least 9 months on the juice. For a while I was OK with that, but recently the hot flashes and brain fog have been getting to me and I'm having second thoughts. I'm considering delaying getting the third injection from my PCP, which should be the first week of September (my Saipan PCP dispenses it) until I can discuss it with with the RO on Guam at my next appointment on September 18. Because of the extra time it takes to ship the medication to Saipan, that means if I agree to continue on Eligard, I wouldn't get the injection till the end of September. Given the half-life of the juice, am I running any risk by the delay?

You are probably okay for one month given the half life as you said. In fact you probably won't even notice any reduction in the SE's during that time. I sure haven't. It's been one month since I "would have" had my last shot, July 2018. Instead my last was this past January, and the hot flashes and brain fog are as bad as ever.

I faced a similar quandary. My RO was okay with me ending HT two months after the end of ART, which would have been one full year. But he also mentioned that the radiation would continue to kill cancer cells for another 8-9 months after the end of RT. Given that I was initially told by my surgeon three years, and I had read that 18 months is the new three years, I opted for an additional six month shot so it would still be working full strength until the radiation had completed its work.

The question is really how long it will take the boys to re-start T production when the Eligard is gone. In the following chart from a Korean study, in men who had been taking leuprolide for 6 months (Group B), T levels more than doubled in one month following cessation, but were still pretty low (but the standard deviation is high in this small sample (n=25).

/www.eymj.org/ViewImage.php?Type=T&aid=353438&id=T2&afn=69_YMJ_55_3_570&fn=ymj-55-570-i002_0069YMJ

Saipan Paradise said...
Allen, am I reading that table right? Is it saying that 12 months after stopping a 6-month treatment, T level is still under 10? That's hardly any recovery at all.

Nope.

That table is in ng/mL. Another common metric is ng/dL, 100 times higher and what's commonly discussed. So a normal T level is 250-1000 or so ng/dL. That would be 2.5 to 10 ng/ml.

Multiply those table values by 100 to get familiar numbers in ng/dL.