Cryosurgery has a significantly lower rate of urinary and fecal incontinence. Cryosurgery appears to have significantly lower local recurrence rates in high risk patients. Cryosurgery can be repeated while radical prostatectomy cannot.
Cryosurgery has much lower complication rates in radiation failures than radical prostatectomy.
Radiation seeds work less well in this patient group requiring these patients to get additional external beam radiation in addition to the seeds. The Medicare review of cryosurgery stated that when the same criteria are used for evaluation of the results, cryosurgery results were superior to radiation seeds. The reason for this is that opposed to radiation the adequacy of the cryosurgery procedure can be monitored and the treatment changed if needed at the time of the original operation. It has been shown that when patients recur after radiation that the tumor aggressiveness increases leaving the patient with a more dangerous tumor. This is not the case with cryosurgery.