Differential post-prostatectomy cancer-specific survival of occult T3 vs. clinical T3 prostate cancer: Implications for managing patients upstaged on prostate magnetic resonance imaging - Abstract

PURPOSE/OBJECTIVE: Long-term androgen deprivation therapy (ADT) was proven in randomized trials to be superior to short-term ADT for radiation-managed patients who have clinical T3 (cT3) disease, but it is unknown whether patients with T3 disease seen only on magnetic resonance imaging require similarly aggressive treatment.

We attempted to study this issue by analogy by comparing the long-term post-prostatectomy survival of patients with cT3 disease versus cT1/T2 disease upstaged to pathologic T3 disease.

METHODS: The Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results (SEER) database was used to identify 60,165 men diagnosed with prostate adenocarcinoma between 1995 and 2002 who underwent prostatectomy. Prostate cancer-specific mortality (PCSM) was evaluated by stage after adjusting for grade, marital status, race, sex, year of diagnosis, and age.

RESULTS: The median follow-up was 10.5 years. Patients with cT1/T2 but pathologic T3a disease had significantly better 10-year PCSM than men with cT3 disease had (3.0% vs. 9.9%, adjusted hazard ratio [AHR] = 0.420, P< 0.001), but they had worse PCSM than men with pathologic T2 disease had (3.0% vs. 0.91%, AHR = 2.53, P< 0.001). Of patients with occult T3a disease, those with low-grade/intermediate-grade disease (Gleason score 7 or less) had a slightly higher 10-year PCSM when compared with those with pathologic T2 disease (1.34% vs. 0.91%, AHR = 1.69, P< 0.001). Patients with cT1/T2 and pathologic T3b disease had similar PCSM as men presenting with cT3 disease (11.0% vs. 9.86%, AHR = 1.14 [0.862, 1.52], P = 0.353).

CONCLUSIONS: Patients with occult T3a disease had less than half the risk of PCSM as those with cT3 disease, and a subset of those men had similar risk as patients with pathologic T2 disease. Therefore, it is possible that radiation-managed patients with low-grade/intermediate-grade T3a disease by magnetic resonance imaging only might not require long-term ADT. However, patients with occult T3b or high-grade occult T3a disease have similar PCSM as that of those presenting with cT3 disease, so they should be treated as aggressively, including long-course ADT when managed by radiation.

Written by:
Muralidhar V, Dinh KT, Mahal BA, Ziehr DR, Chen YW, Viswanathan VB, Nezolosky MD, Choueiri TK, Hoffman KE, Hu JC, Sweeney CJ, Trinh QD, Nguyen PL.   Are you the author?
Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA; Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA; Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, Boston, MA; Department of Radiation Oncology, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Brigham and Women's Hospital, Boston, MA; Department of Medical Oncology, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Brigham and Women's Hospital, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA; Department of Radiation Oncology, MD Anderson Cancer Center, Houston, TX; Department of Urology, Brigham and Women's Hospital, Boston, MA.  

 

Reference: Urol Oncol. 2015 Jul;33(7):330.e19-25.
doi: 10.1016/j.urolonc.2015.03.010

 
PubMed Abstract
PMID: 25990612

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