Focal Therapy Offers Middle Ground for Some Prostate Cancer Patients
Men with low-risk prostate cancer who previously had to choose between aggressive treatment, with the potential for significant side effects, and active surveillance, with the risk of disease progression, may have a new option. Focal laser ablation uses precisely targeted heat, delivered through a small insertion and guided into the prostate by magnetic resonance imaging, to burn away cancerous cells in the prostate.
A small, phase 1 trial, to published early online in the journal Radiology, found that this approach, designed to treat just the diseased portion of the prostate rather than removing or irradiating the entire gland, is safe and can be performed without the troubling complications associated with more aggressive therapies.
None of the nine men treated in the study had a significant side effect. Six months after therapy, seven of the nine patients (78%) no longer had evidence of cancerous tissue in biopsies of the treated area.
"Focal therapy is the male version of a lumpectomy for breast cancer," said study author Scott Eggener, MD, associate professor of surgery at the University of Chicago Medicine. "Rather than removing the entire organ, we are testing this less-invasive way of destroying just the cancer and leaving healthy tissue in place."
"This experimental approach appears to combine the most attractive element of treatment, eradication of the cancer, with the most appealing element of active surveillance, maintaining quality of life," said Aytekin Oto, MD, professor of radiology and chief of abdominal imaging at the University of Chicago Medicine. "These early safety results are promising, but we definitely need longer-term data."
More than 2 million American men have been diagnosed with prostate cancer. Due to prostate specific antigen testing (PSA), most of these cancers are detected early, long before they cause symptoms. Because this cancer occurs primarily in older men, treatment with radiation or surgery is not always necessary as these are man are much more likely to die from another cause than from prostate cancer.
But many healthy men who are relatively young, with a life expectancy greater than 10 years, are not comfortable deferring treatment of a potentially lethal disease. Surgery and radiation can often cure the cancer, but can cause side effects, such as incontinence, impotence and decreased bowel function.
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