ABSTRACT
Historical background Hormonal manipulation for the treatment of prostate disease dates back more than 100 years. However, little was known of the effect of sex hormones on the initiation and progression of prostate cancer until the late 1930s. In 1941, Huggins and Hodges at the University of Chicago presented their Nobel prize-winning paper in which they demonstrated that, due to the dependence of the normal prostate gland on sex hormones for growth, either surgical castration or treatment with diethylstilbestrol (DES) had significant therapeutic implications for men with prostate cancer.1 This discovery marked the beginning of modern hormonal manipulation in men with prostate cancer.
