Live Longer Doctors have suspected that radiation therapy helped prevent patients from dying of prostate cancer, but had little scientific proof. Now, Richard Valicenti, M.D. , assistant professor of radiation oncology at Jefferson Medical College of Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia, and his colleagues have found the first conclusive evidence that radiation therapy helps patients with localized prostate cancer live longer. He reports his team's findings July 14 in the Journal of Clinical Oncology. Prostate cancer, the most common cancer in elderly men, tends to be a slow growing disease men frequently die with, not from.
Doctors often question whether surgery or radiation provide any real benefit for the older patient.
The researchers retrospectively examined the results of 1560 patients who had received radiation therapy alone for prostate cancer. The patients were among those treated between 1975 and 1995 in four separate trials conducted by the Radiation Therapy Oncology Group, a federally funded cancer clinical trials group. The average follow up was eight years, with some patients seen for as many as 12 years. They found that in dividing men into four categories according to the likelihood of having a more dangerous cancer, those with the worst prognoses benefited the most from receiving higher doses of radiation. Dr. Valicenti, a member of Jefferson's Kimmel Cancer Center, and his co-workers at Jefferson, Wayne State University in Detroit, the University of Southern California, McAuley Health Center in Ann Arbor, MI, and Einstein Medical Center in Philadelphia examined patients' Gleason scores.