FROM JOURNAL OF CLINICAL ONCOLOGY
More fuel for the radiation vs. surgery in prostate cancer debate comes from a study suggesting that patients with high-risk localized prostate cancer treated with external beam radiotherapy (EBRT) plus brachytherapy – with or without androgen deprivation (AD) – have survival rates equivalent to those of patients treated with radical prostatectomy (RP).
However, patients treated with EBRT and androgen deprivation without brachytherapy had significantly worse survival compared with patients treated with surgery, according to Ronald D. Ennis, MD, of Rutgers Cancer Institute of New Jersey, New Brunswick, and his colleagues.
“The data reported herein suggest that RT plus brachytherapy with or without AD and RP are associated with similar survival. This finding reinforces the need for patients to seek opinions from both a urologic oncologic surgeon with expertise in RP and a radiation oncologist with expertise in brachytherapy. The natural human tendency for physicians to prefer their modality necessitates this dual consultation approach, preferably in a single joint consultation visit,” the researchers wrote. The report was published in the Journal of Clinical Oncology .
The investigators attempted to control for variables that could influence the results by drawing on data on a large number of patients – 42,765 – who were treated at a large number of facilities across the United States. In addition, they incorporated data on clinical stage and Gleason score for all patients, prostate-specific antigen measurements, comorbidities, and socioeconomic factors that are either known or thought to influence treatment decisions.
They used inverse probability of treatment weight to adjust for imbalances of covariables among the treatment groups, and then created weighted time-dependent Cox proportional hazard models to estimate the effects of each type of treatment on survival.
Their sample included 24,688 patients who underwent RP, 15,435 who received EBRT with AD, and 2,642 who underwent EBRT and brachytherapy with or without AD.
They found no statistical difference in survival between RP and EBRT plus brachytherapy with/without AD in inverse probability of treatment weighted analysis. The hazard ratio for EBRT/brachytherapy was 1.17, but this was not statistically significant (95% confidence interval, 0.88-1.55).
In contrast. EBRT plus AD was associated with significantly worse survival, with a hazard ration of 1.53 (95% CI, 1.22-1.92).
The authors noted that “this finding reinforces the importance of complications, particularly in the urinary, sexual, and bowel domains, in combination with patient priorities and preferences, in determining an individual patient’s optimal choice. Significant data have been published in recent years regarding patient-reported outcomes that should be shared with all new patients to help guide them to their personal optimal treatment.”
They added that for some patients, quality of life may be a more important factor than survival when choosing a treatment modality.
SOURCE: Ennis et al. J Clin Oncol. 2018 Feb 28. doi: 10.1200/JCO.2017.75.9134