Monitoring can work for low-risk prostate tumours

New research indicates not all cancers need treatment right away

The biopsy shows cancer, so you have to act fast, right? Not necessarily, if it’s a prostate tumour.

Men increasingly have choices if their cancer is found at an early stage. They can treat it right away or monitor with periodic tests and treat later if it worsens or causes symptoms.

Long-term results are in from one of the few studies comparing these options in men with tumours confined to the prostate. After 20 years, death rates were similar for those who had immediate surgery and those initially assigned to monitoring, and surgery had more side-effects.

“Many men when they hear the word cancer want to do something about it,” said one study leader, Gerald Andriole, urology chief at Washington University in St. Louis. “The reality is, if you have a low-risk cancer, like the study shows, you don’t need treatment, certainly not urgently.”

It’s not all black and white, though. Not all cancers are destined to kill. Some prostate tumours are deadly, but most grow so slowly men will die of something else.

Treatments — surgery, radiation or hormone therapy — can cause impotence, incontinence, infections and other problems, and sometimes do more harm than the disease ever would.

Monitoring doesn’t mean do nothing. Men can get frequent tests, and there are better ways to detect disease progression, so there’s usually still a chance to treat and potentially cure it if it starts to worsen, Andriole said.

Only a few studies have tested monitoring versus immediate treatment.

One found no difference in death rates after more than 20 years; another found surgery improved survival odds, but only for men under 65.

Those were done before wide use of PSA blood tests, when more tumours were found because they caused symptoms, which often means more advanced disease.

Researchers wondered: Would the results be similar with modern screening and treatments?

The new study, sponsored by the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, aimed to answer that. Doctors assigned 731 men to observation or surgery. After a decade, survival rates were similar, but doctors wanted longer followup.

Now, after 20 years, two thirds of these men have died and the original conclusions still stand, though the numbers leaned in surgery’s favour. Fewer men died in the surgery group, but the difference was small enough it could have been due to chance. Only about nine per cent of men ultimately died from prostate cancer, showing how relatively seldom the disease proves fatal.

Results were in the New England Journal of Medicine July 13.

Fewer men in the surgery group later had treatment because there were signs the disease might be worsening — 34 per cent, versus 60 per cent of the group assigned to monitoring. In many cases, it was prompted by rising PSA levels, but surgery also clearly prevented more cases from spreading throughout the body.

Half of the group assigned to monitoring wound up getting some sort of treatment within five years. In one quarter of those cases, men “just got fed up” with monitoring and thinking about cancer, Andriole said. The rest were prompted by signs of progression.