EXTERNAL-BEAM RADIATION TREATMENT FOR PROSTATE CANCER: RESULTS
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It’s difficult to show any real differences between the results of radiation and radical prostatectomy, if you look at overall fifteen-year survival rates of men with prostate cancer after both treatments. A large study from Stanford reported an overall survival of 50 percent, fifteen years after treatment, for men with stages T1a and T1b (A1 and A2) disease. From these statistics, radiation therapy looks highly promising. However, most of the patients who are initially diagnosed with localized prostate cancer who die during the first fifteen years after any form of treatment die from other causes—so studies of overall survival don’t always reveal the whole story.
Other studies of radiation therapy use different measuring slicks—prostate biopsies and PSA tests. Depending on how many biopsies are taken, anywhere from 30 percent to 90 percent of men who have received external-beam radiation therapy can have a positive biopsy two years or more after treatment. Although this does not mean that allot these men will have treatment failure— that their cancer will come back—long-term follow-up studies have found that many patients do. At five years after treatment, only 25 percent of patients will have low or undetectable levels of PSA. At ten years, only 10 percent will. However, despite the fact that PSA may be measurable, many of these men have not yet demonstrated any clinical signs of treatment failure (urinary tract obstruction, for example); these findings suggest that radiation therapy can effectively control local symptoms from prostate cancer in many patients. And frankly, for many older men—a 75-year-old man who gets radiation today, for example—it isn’t going to matter too much if PSA rises slightly ten years from now, if the therapy has controlled the cancer.
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Tags: Erectile Dysfunction, Men’s Health
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