Brachytherapy for prostate cancer treatment
Pichon Riviere A, Augustovski F, Cernadas C, Ferrante D, Regueiro A, Garcia Marti S
Record ID 32005000618
Spanish
Authors' objectives:
This study aims to provide an overview of the effectiveness of brachytherapy for prostate cancer treatment.
Authors' results and conclusions:
There are no randomized, comparative studies comparing brachyotherapy with other treatment modalities. The different case series published report highly variable disease-free survival rates depending on the disease stage, tumor differentiation and pre-treatment prostate-specific antigen (PSA) levels. In well-selected patient, disease-free survival is close to 90% at 5 years and 66% at 10 years. However, up until now there has not been enough evidence to recommend brachytherapy unconditionally for the treatment of localized prostate carcinoma over standard or alternative treatments.
Authors' recommendations:
If the therapeutic decision is to perform an active treatment (as opposed to observation and medical control), the patients should be appropriately informed of the scope and potential adverse effects of the treatment, and should take part in this decision. The undesirable effects include irritative or obstructive symptoms in up to 50% of the cases and 1-14% of acute urinary retention. Long term consequences are infrequent (< 5%), including incontinence, cystitis, proctitis and urethral narrowing. Sexual potency 2 or 3 years after the procedure is maintained in 86-96% of the patients. Global morbidity would be somewhat lower than for external radiotherapy or radical prostatectomy.
Authors' methods:
Overview
Details
Project Status:
Completed
URL for project:
http://www.iecs.org.ar/
Year Published:
2003
English language abstract:
An English language summary is available
Publication Type:
Not Assigned
Country:
Argentina
MeSH Terms
- Brachytherapy
- Male
- Treatment Outcome
- Prostatic Neoplasms
Contact
Organisation Name:
Institute for Clinical Effectiveness and Health Policy
Contact Address:
Dr. Emilio Ravignani 2024, Buenos Aires - Argentina, C1414 CABA
Contact Name:
info@iecs.org.ar
Contact Email:
info@iecs.org.ar
Copyright:
Institute for Clinical Effectiveness and Health Policy (IECS)
This is a bibliographic record of a published health technology assessment from a member of INAHTA or other HTA producer. No evaluation of the quality of this assessment has been made for the HTA database.