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Treatment Decision - Radical Prostatectomy versus Radiation Therapy
Prostate Cancer | Last Active: Oct 19 10:23am | Replies (57)Comment receiving replies
It's great that this site exists, but as I've mentioned before, use with extreme caution, because it can give you a false sense of confidence.
Combining and comparing data from multiple studies taken at different times with different participants and methodologies massively reduces the accuracy and precision, and it also can't account for other personal factors that your care team would take into accout.
The best way to use it is not as a way to decide, but as a source of informed questions to ask your care team. And pay attention only to large differences; smaller ones are likely just statistical noise.
Replies to "It's great that this site exists, but as I've mentioned before, use with extreme caution, because..."
Scott
The ellipses show the possible spread of the data.
When you take lab data and plot it on a graph, it doesn’t form a perfect line. Instead there is some randomness to the line. When you look at it it looks like a cloud of dots that form what looks like a line.
So the bigger the elipse, the higher the possible spread based on the data available.
If there were many more data points on the graph its possible that the ellipses would shrink and become more line like
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It also looks like
https://www.prostatecancerfree.org/compare-prostate-cancer-treatments/
doesn't include the ARSI "-lutamides" like Apalutamide (Erleada), Enzalutamide (Xtandi), or Darolutamide (Nubeqa) among the treatment options. They're probably the biggest advance in recent years for keeping those of us with advanced or aggressive prostate cancer alive.
If the site just bundles them in with "ADT", then the results wouldn't be too useful, because studies like TITAN have shown a huge overall survival difference between ADT alone and ADT + ARSI.