Genitourinary Cancers

NEW YORK--Marion Morra, associate director of the Yale Cancer Center, has collaborated with her sister Eve Potts, a medical writer for more than 30 years, to produce The Prostate Cancer Answer Book: An Unbiased Treatment Guide, published in September by Avon Books to coincide with Prostate Cancer Awareness Month.

Physicians screening African-American men for prostate cancer should use different cut-off points for a popular blood test because they will accurately detect 95% of cases in this high-risk group, according to a study published in the August 1 issue of The New England Journal of Medicine. The revised normal values for the prostate-specific antigen (PSA) test are based on a new diagnostic strategy and age-specific ranges for African-Americans, who have the world's highest prostate cancer rate.

BETHESDA, Md--Physicians have long hypothesized that natural variation in sex hormones may influence prostate cancer risk, said Meir Stampfer, MD, of the Harvard School of Public Health. Efforts to prove this, however, have yielded unclear results. Now, by examining the interrelationship of different sex hormones, Dr. Stampfer and his colleagues have achieved what he calls the first clear demonstration that circulating levels of sex hormones can predict a man's risk of developing prostate cancer.

Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia has received a patent for a molecular-based blood test that provides a novel approach to diagnosing prostate cancer. Jefferson has given exclusive licensing rights to the test to UroCor, Inc., for the United States and Canada, and to the Italian-based biotechnology firm Raggio-Italgene, for Europe and Japan.

The paper by Drs. Moul and Heidenreich provides a very nice review of prognostic factors for metastasis in patients with clinical stage I nonseminoma. Risk-adapted management--ie, the management of patients at low risk for metastasis by surveillance and patients at high risk for metastasis by retroperitoneal lymph node dissection (RPLND)--is very reasonable, and we are now at a point where a paradigm can be developed to accurately classify clinical stage I patients as either low or high risk and manage them accordingly.

The treatment of advanced prostate cancer continues to be an enigma. Every few years, it seems, a new variation in treatment is espoused and offered to the public. To date, two trends seem to have emerged: For men under 70 years of age, there seems to be a consensus that definitive treatment should be pursued for low-grade, low-stage, localized tumors. Prostatectomy or radiation therapy may cure or at least increase survival; for men over age 70, less vigorous treatment is often the preferred choice [1,2]. Nevertheless, outside of these two points of agreement, many other controversial questions remain and will persist for some time.

Over the last 10 years, we have learned more about not only the natural history of untreated locally advanced prostate cancer but also the ways in which we can effectively modify radiation therapy to treat this disease. There are now sufficient data to suggest that patients with prostate cancer that is considered locally advanced (stages T2b to T4) have a propensity for the development of lymph node metastasis and occult distant spread. In these patients, there also is a recognized difficulty in controlling the disease locally with radiation, due to the bulk of tumor present and the surrounding dose-limiting, late-reacting normal tissues.

Prognostic Factors in Low-Stage Nonseminomatous Testicular Cancer

The staging and treatment of prostate cancer are complex, particularly in patients with clinical disease that has advanced locally beyond the confines of the gland. Management choices are made more difficult by a paucity of

BETHESDA, Md--Physicians who screen for prostate cancer using prostate-specific antigen (PSA) need to use a different set of normal age-adjusted values for their African-American patients, say Judd W. Moul, MD, LTC, MC, USA, and colleagues from the Walter Reed Army Medical Center, Mayo Clinic, and Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences funded by the Department of Defense (DOD) Center for Prostate Disease Research.

Whether patients with clinical stage I nonseminomatous testicular germ-cell cancer (NSGCT) should be treated with orchiectomy and retroperitoneal lymph node dissection (RPLND) or orchiectomy and surveillance remains

PHILADELPHIA--Although the addition of chemotherapy to supportive care with a corticosteroid provides no survival advantage for patients with hormone-refractory prostate cancer, the combination appears to achieve better pain control, compared with corticosteroid therapy alone.

ORLANDO--Treatment of recurrent prostate cancer, whether by prostatectomy or chemotherapy, has not yielded very effective or long lasting results. Many patients now ask about cryotherapy, in the hopes of better effectiveness and/or improved quality of life (less incontinence and less chance of impotence). However, urologists have been reluctant to use salvage cryosurgery for prostate cancer patients after radiation or hormonal therapy, because the outcome and quality of life data were simply not there, Louis L. Pisters, MD, said at the American Urological Association meeting earlier this year.

Pretreatment prostate-specific antigen (PSA) level is the single most important prognostic factor for patients undergoing radiotherapy for clinically localized prostate cancer. When combined with Gleason score and T-stage, pretreatment PSA enhances our ability to accurately predict pathologic stage. Patients with pretreatment PSA levels more than 10 ng/mL are at high risk for biochemical failure when treated with conventional radiation alone. A PSA nadir of more than 1 ng/mL and a post-treatment PSA more than 1.5 ng/mL are associated with a high risk of biochemical failure. Postoperative radiotherapy delivered while the tumor burden is low (eg, PSA less than 1 ng/mL) predicts a favorable outcome. Many of these conclusions about the usefulness of pretreatment PSA are based on the assumption that PSA can be used as a surrogate end point for disease-free and overall survival from prostate cancer. However, this assumption still remains to be validated by phase III trials. [ONCOLOGY 10(8):1143-1153, 1996]

Radical radiation therapy and radical prostatectomy are the two most commonly employed therapeutic alternatives for clinically localized (T1-T2,NX,M0) prostate cancer. A vigorous debate is ongoing about the relative efficacy of each modality. This debate centers around the percentage of patients who cannot be cured by one method or the other, suggesting that some patients may be better served by one treatment, or by some form of combined-modality therapy employing radiation after surgery or neoadjuvant androgen suppression before radiation.

ASCO--In an EORTC study, the combination of radiotherapy and adjuvant hormonal therapy with an LHRH analog has been shown to significantly increase survival in patients with locally advanced prostate cancer, compared with radiotherapy alone.

ASCO--Many men diagnosed with prostate cancer will not die of their disease if left untreated, but clinicians have no way of telling which early cancers require more aggressive treatment and which are likely to be indolent. A new genetic test, developed by researchers at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, may shed some light on this important dilemma.

FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla--The duration of anticipated survival after a prostate cancer diagnosis, and therefore the period of time at risk in the disease, is unique to prostate cancer in the influence it exerts on selection of therapy.

Researchers at two major medical centers have found that radiation therapy is just as successful as surgery in treating younger men with early-stage prostate cancer. Currently, men 60 years old or under with prostate cancer are far more likely to be treated with surgery than with radiation therapy.

MARINA DEL REY, Calif--Preliminary studies show that cryosurgical ablation of the prostate can be used to treat localized prostate cancer, resulting in negative post-treatment biopsies and undetectable serum PSA levels, reported Peter R. Carroll, MD, associate professor of urology and director, Urologic Oncology Program, University of California, San Francisco (UCSF).

PALM SPRINGS, Calif--Early diagnosis of prostate cancer can be a mixed blessing, bringing with it not only the chance of cure but also the psychological distress of choosing between watchful waiting and treatment, and if treatment is chosen, which treatment, Andrew Roth, MD, said at the Academy of Psychosomatic Medicine meeting.

MIAMI BEACH--Early-stage prostate cancer patients treated with three-dimensional conformal radiotherapy (3D-CRT) at the University of Michigan Medical Center had excellent survival rates with few complications, Howard Sandler, MD, reported at the American Society for Therapeutic Radiology and Oncology (ASTRO) meeting.

WILMINGTON, Del--Zeneca Pharmaceutical's Casodex (bicaluta-mide), a new nonsteroidal antiandrogen, has received FDA approval for the hormonal treatment of advanced prostate cancer in combination with a luteinizing-hormone-releasing hormone analog (LHRH-A). The agent acts by binding to cytosol androgen receptors.

The safety and efficacy of a new chemoradiation approach to treating bladder cancer, which is designed to effect a cure while

The value of prostate cancer screening remains controversial because of the high prevalence of the disease and the fact that many tumors detected through screening are not destined to lead to morbidity or mortality, rendering

Widespread use of prostate-specific antigen (PSA) as a screening tool has led to an increased incidence of biopsy-proven prostate cancer, as well as a shift toward more cases with clinically confined disease (stage T1 to T2). The two traditional therapeutic modalities, radical prostatectomy and external-beam radiation therapy, have undergone technical refinements. Other modalities, such as brachytherapy and cryosurgery, are also being used to treat early-stage disease. Comparisons between treatment results are difficult. Biochemical failure, based on PSA findings, is currently used to measure treatment efficacy, but the precise definition and clinical relevance of biochemical failure have yet to be established. The author presents current analyses of biochemical failure, cause-specific survival, distant metastasis, and morbidity rates following various treatment modalities. [ONCOLOGY 9(9):803-816, 1995]

Dr. Stock provides a thorough summary of recent data on the principal modes of treatment for early-stage prostate cancer. Prostatectomy, external radiation, and brachytherapy have all improved substantially over the last 15 years. Despite these improvements, however, it is still unclear how these modalities compare in terms of efficacy and morbidity. To provide some balance to his evenhanded approach, I will add a few remarks.

The article by Stock provides a comparison of outcomes following radiation therapy and radical prostatectomy in men with clinically localized prostate cancer. The reliability of this comparison is complicated by the lack of randomized trials and the obvious selection biases inherent in uncontrolled studies. Ultimately, however, the value of either therapy depends critically on the difference between radiation or surgery and watchful waiting--an issue that is not addressed in this article.

CHICAGO--Until recently, physicians would have offered watchful waiting only to a select group of older men with localized prostate cancer. Now, because of concerns about the quality as well as the length of life, physicians are vigorously debating whether watchful waiting may be an option for men as young as the early 50s.

WASHINGTON--A report released by the Congressional Office of Technology Assessment (OTA) says that screening for prostate cancer has not yet been proven to save lives. The report concluded: "Because scientific knowledge is limited, but the consequences of prostate cancer and its treatment are serious, an informed and reasonable patient could equally well decide to have screening or forego it." Nevertheless, OTA said that it would be reasonable for Medicare to consider reimbursement for such screening.