Study: Radiotherapy Doses for Prostate Cancer Could Be Cut By 75%

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Facts

  • According to a study by the UK's Royal Marsden NHS Foundation Trust and the Institute of Cancer Research in London, higher doses of radiation therapy can reduce medium-risk prostate cancer patients' treatment doses by as much as 75%.1
  • The Prostate Advances in Comparative Evidence study — whose findings will be presented on Monday to the American Society for Radiation Oncology in San Diego — compared results from 874 patients in the UK, Ireland, and Canada.2
  • The phase III randomized trial found that 96% of the men who received five doses of stereotactic body radiotherapy over one to two weeks experienced no cancer progression after five years, compared to 95% who received at least 20 doses of conventional radiotherapy over four to eight weeks.3
  • The researchers claim stereotactic body radiotherapy, which allows clinicians to target tumors to sub-millimeter precision, performed as effectively as conventional radiotherapy for patients whose cancer hadn't spread beyond the prostate.4
  • Meanwhile, five years post-treatment, 5.5% of men who received stereotactic body radiotherapy experienced grade 2 or higher side effects, compared to 3.2% who received conventional radiotherapy.5
  • With more than 1.4M cases diagnosed and over 375K deaths worldwide in 2020, prostate cancer is the second most common cancer in men. It's the second leading cause of cancer death in men in the US.6

Sources: 1BBC News, 2Independent, 3Royalmarsden.nhs.uk, 4Daily Mail, 5Icr and 6Cancer.net.

Narratives

  • Narrative A, as provided by Guardian. This is a game-changer for people with intermediate-risk, localized prostate cancer. With the rapidly advancing field of radiotherapy, they can get effective radiation therapy that reduces the toxic treatment's duration and dosage, minimizes damage to surrounding healthy tissue, and increases the chance of keeping the disease at bay.
  • Narrative B, as provided by Johns hopkins medicine. It's good to see that multibeam therapy can help prostate cancer patients get treated more quickly. However, as over 80% of prostate cancers are usually detected early, and the 5-year relative survival rate for most men with local or regional prostate cancer is nearly 100%, the revolutionary approach should have focused on curing high-risk, later-stage patients.

Predictions