What factors affect the PSA relapse-free survival times in patients treated with permanent seed brachytherapy?
Robert E Reiter* and Stephen Riggs
Correspondence *Department of Urology, University of California, Los Angeles, 66–135 Center for Health Sciences, Los Angeles, CA 90095, USA
Email rreiter@mednet.ucla.edu
This article has no abstract so we have provided the first paragraph of the full text.
The authors of this study present excellent long-term biochemical control rates after permanent brachytherapy monotherapy in patients with prostate cancer stratified according to risk. What is most notable about this study, however, is the inherent difficulty of assessing biochemical control in this group of patients, as the degree of control depends on the criteria used to define it. For example, the 8-year PRFS for low-risk patients was 82% using the ASTRO definition, but the PRFS dropped to 74% when the alternative definition was used. Also, visual inspection of the Kaplan–Meier curves reveals a progressive downward trend in survival over time, which indicates that the number of patients free of disease will continue to decline. Although the survival curves flatten, the small number of intermediate-risk patients (n = 97) and high-risk patients (n = 12) at 8 years likely creates this artifice. These low numbers make meaningful interpretation of freedom from biochemical failure difficult beyond 5 years.
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