Generally it is believed that clinical stage of localized prostate cancer helps determine disease reoccurrence risk. More advanced clinical stage may point out a greater threat of cancer recurrence after treatment, but this is not true. A latest study suggests that there is no association between localized prostate cancer’s clinical stage and chances of cancer recurrence after prostate removal.
Clinical stage is apparently of questionable utility for anticipating disease recurrence after surgically removing the prostate (radical prostatectomy) in patients with localized prostate cancer. Scientists focused to analyze whether staging errors result in such discrepancy. A multi-institutional national disease registry containing information of 3,875 men was evaluated. Adam Reese, MD, of the University of California, San Francisco, and colleagues observed that 35.4 percent of the volunteers were assigned incorrectly through clinical stage.
Most errors probably took place as physicians frequently failed to consider the results of transrectal ultrasound tests. The assigning stage doctors had supposedly not incorporated biopsy results appropriately. On correcting the staging errors, no link between clinical stage and prostate cancer recurrence after radical prostatectomy appeared.
The research was published online in CANCER.