The 2022 American Urological Association (AUA) Annual Meeting is now underway (in person!) in New Orleans, and this week, the AUA released an updated guideline for localized prostate cancer, again working jointly with the SUO and ASTRO. The guideline includes many notable updates and changes, but one of the most important is the removal of the “very low” risk category and explicit endorsement of active surveillance as “preferred” management for all low-risk disease.
This change is timely, and particularly notable in contrast to the NCCN guideline, which last year not only reiterated the “very low risk” category but transiently removed “preferred” from its listing of surveillance for “low risk” disease, endorsing prostatectomy and radiation as equivalent alternatives. The NCCN reversed this decision a few months later, and now once again states that surveillance is “preferred,” though with multiple caveats and exceptions. So which guideline is more relevant for contemporary practice?
Matthew R. Cooperberg, MD, MPH graduated from Dartmouth College, where he finished summa cum laude with a major in English. He earned his MD and MPH degrees at Yale University and completed residency in Urology and fellowship in Urologic Oncology at UCSF. At the end of his training, Dr. Cooperberg joined the faculty at UCSF, where he maintains busy clinical practices at the UCSF Helen Diller Family Comprehensive Cancer Center and the San Francisco VA Medical Center. He also holds a secondary appointment in the Department of Epidemiology & Biostatistics. He is actively engaged in research approaching the challenges of prostate cancer from many interrelated angles, from molecular analyses to health system-wide research. He has written or contributed to over 350 research articles. Early in 2013 Dr. Cooperberg co-authored a proposal for a national urology registry which served as the basis for the AUA Quality (AQUA) Registry, a project for which he now serves as Senior Physician Advisor. In 2015 he won the AUA Gold Cystoscope Award, and in 2016 was awarded his first R01 grant as Principal Investigator from the National Cancer Institute, to develop and validate novel miRNA-based biomarker signatures for refined prostate cancer prognosis. He lives in San Francisco with his wife, Jacqueline Dolev (a derm-atologist and fellow Yale Medical School alum), where they work primarily to keep up with their children, Jake and Sarah.
