Implant and External Radiation for Prostate Cancer With or Without Hormonal Therapy: A Prospective Randomized Trial

In calender year 2005, 220, 000 men will be diagnosed with prostate cancer and approximately 30,000 will subsequently die of metastatic disease. Although the vast majority of men will be diagnosed with clinically localized and potentially curable disease, the selection of one local modality over another remains a focus of significant controversy within the uro-oncology community. However, patients with higher risk features are most often managed with radiotherapeutic approaches to include androgen deprivation therapy.

Prostate brachytherapy represents the ultimate-three dimensional conformal therapy and permits dose escalation far exceeding other modalities. Following permanent prostate brachytherapy with or without supplemental external beam radiation therapy, favorable long-term biochemical outcomes have been reported for patients with low, intermediate and high risk features with a morbidity profile that compares favorably with competing local modalities (1,2).

Several prospective randomized trials have demonstrated that androgen deprivation therapy in conjunction with conventional doses of external beam radiation therapy (65-70 Gy)results in improvement in disease-free and overall survival in patients with locally advanced prostate cancer (3,4).