prostate-report.org

Few patients die from prostate cancer within 15 years of radical prostatectomy

Researchers at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center (MSKCC), along with collaborating teams at the Cleveland Clinic and the University of Michigan, have completed a study of prostate cancer death after standard treatment to remove the prostate since PSA screening has become widely used as a method to screen for the disease.

Researchers found that in a group of 12,677 men who had radical prostatectomies between 1987 and 2005, the fifteen-year mortality rate that could be directly linked to prostate cancer was only 12 percent, even though many of the patients’ cancers had aggressive features. Comparatively, the rate of non- cancer-related death in this group was 38 percent. A small fraction, 4 percent, of patients treated surgically within the past ten years had a 5 percent or greater risk of dying of prostate cancer within 15 years. It is not clear at this time whether the outcomes may be related to the effectiveness of surgery and any secondary therapy, or to the low lethality of certain types of prostate cancers to begin with.

The study is published online in the Journal of Clinical Oncology.