After being diagnosed with aggressive prostate cancer, many men are told that their disease is untreatable and that less aggressive treatment is best.
Often this means patients are told to watch and wait -- that is, to do nothing at all. A new study by physician-scientists at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital/Weill Cornell Medical Center turns conventional wisdom on its head, finding either surgical removal of the prostate (prostatectomy) or radiation treatment more than doubles the life expectancy for these patients when compared with those receiving the conservative approach.
Patients with the most aggressive non-metastatic prostate cancers (Gleason scores 8–10), if treated with prostatectomy or radiation, can expect to live more than 14 years; those treated conservatively will live, on average, less than 7 years. The study appears in the March Journal of Urology.
"Unfortunately, pessimism abounds among many doctors, who believe that aggressive prostate cancers are beyond cure and should only be followed with watchful waiting, forestalling any immediate treatment. This new study points to the fallacy of this outlook, finding surgery and radiation more than double the life expectancy for these patients," says Dr. Ashutosh Tewari, the study's first author and director of robotic prostatectomy and urologic oncology outcomes at NewYork-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell and the Ronald P. Lynch Associate Professor of Urologic Oncology at Weill Cornell Medical College.
The study involved a retrospective statistical analysis of outcomes of 453 cases of clinically localized aggressive prostate (graded Gleason scores 8–10) at the Henry Ford Health System in Detroit.