OBJECTIVES: Prostate cancer (PCa) is the most common cancer in men in Germany, accounting for about 20% of all new cancer cases in Germany. Different treatment regimens are available for PCa patients. We aimed to use real-world data to investigate the treatment patterns and characteristics of drug-treated PCa patients in Germany.

METHODS: The Oncology Dynamics database (IQVIA^TM) was used to identify male adult PCa patients with an ongoing drug treatment between July 2022 and June 2023 in Germany provided by hospitals and office-based physicians via a standardized web-based questionnaire. PCa patients with a documented ICD-10 code C61 were included and further classified into subtypes according to the patients’ documented castration resistance and metastatic status. The cases were extrapolated to the drug-treated PCa patients in Germany. Patients’ demographic and clinical characteristics, such as comorbidities and mutation tests, as well as their treatment landscapes stratified by lines of therapy and ECOG status were ascertained for all PCa subtypes.

RESULTS: In Germany the drug-treated 5-year prevalence and 1-year incidence of PCa are 174,842 and 59,318, respectively. Metastatic PCa patients are younger and have a lower number of comorbidities than non-metastatic patients. Around 30% of mCRPC patients (total: 36,307) were tested for Breast Cancer gene (BRCA) 1/2 mutation, and 6% were tested for other homologous recombination repair (HRR) mutation genes. Among tested PCa patients, 19% are BRCA 1/2 mutant and only around 1% have mutations in other HRR genes. Chemotherapy is the predominant treatment option for mCRPC (31%), followed by second-generation hormone therapy (NHT) combined with androgen deprivation therapy (ADT).

CONCLUSIONS: Despite the low testing rates in the overall population of PCa patients in the study, approximately 20 - 30% of PCa patients carry a BRCA1/2 mutation or a mutation in other HRR genes. HRR testing could be therefore critical for targeted treatment decisions.