Monitoring prostate cancer ‘can be just as beneficial as active treatment’

A new study has called into question the necessity of actively treating prostate cancer, as simply monitoring the disease can sometimes offer the same results.

Led by researchers at the Universities of Oxford and Bristol, this was the first trial to evaluate the efficacy, cost-effectiveness and acceptability of three major treatment options – active monitoring, radical prostatectomy surgery and radiotherapy – for men with localised prostate cancer.

It was found that all three treatments result in similar and very low rates of death from prostate cancer, with surgery and radiotherapy reducing the risk of disease progression over time, but at the cost of causing more unpleasant side-effects.

Moreover, the study also indicated that prostate cancer grows very slowly, with only around one percent men dying from the disease when followed up over a period of ten years, considerably lower than anticipated.

Chief investigator Professor Freddie Hamdy, from the University of Oxford, said: "Longer follow-up is now required to determine the trade-off that patients need to make between cancer outcomes and quality of life, and further research to understand how we can distinguish lethal from non-lethal disease."

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