Early use of salvage radiotherapy in patients with prostate cancer with biochemical recurrence after radical prostatectomy has consistently been shown to provide better oncological outcomes than late use. However, the corresponding scientific literature might be subject to lead-time bias, given that in virtually all the available comparative studies, investigators calculated the survival period of included patients from the time of salvage radiotherapy — instead of from the time of radical prostatectomy.
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Acknowledgements
Quoc-Dien Trinh is supported by an unrestricted educational grant from the Vattikuti Urology Institute, a Clay Hamlin Young Investigator Award from the Prostate Cancer Foundation and a Genentech BioOncology Career Development Award from the Conquer Cancer Foundation of the American Society of Clinical Oncology.
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F.A. has acted as a consultant of GenomeDx Biosciences, this work does not directly relate to the submitted work. The other authors declare no competing interests.
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Seisen, T., Trinh, QD. & Abdollah, F. Could lead-time bias explain the apparent benefits of early salvage radiotherapy?. Nat Rev Urol 14, 193–194 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1038/nrurol.2017.14
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/nrurol.2017.14
