Are the side effects of ADT with LHRH agonist drugs and surgical castration the same?

This is a huge (over 31,000 prostate cancer patients) study from Denmark. The fact that the authors found an increased risk of heart attacks and strokes from patients on LHRH agonist drugs is not really surprising or new.  What is surprising is that that same risk was not found for men who were androgen-deprived from an orchiectomy rather than from drugs, like Lupron and Zoladex.

 

Jespersen CG, Norgaard M, & Borre M. (2014) Androgen-deprivation therapy in treatment of prostate cancer and risk of myocardial infarction and stroke: a nationwide Danish population-based cohort study. Eur Urol 65, 704-9. www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23433805