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← Return to Surgery or Radiation?
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I read the paper you linked. I found it deceptive. It did not fully describe the radiotherapy type and dose. There are vast differences in cure rates that depend on this.
I pulled many many research papers during my time trying to navigate out of this prostate cancer zone. I found NONE that supported the often reported mantra that two vastly different treatment techniques coincidentally yielded identical curative outcomes.
I challenge you to produce more papers. And if you do not come up with the same papers i found, if you do not produce the very easily found papers that i found within maybe an hour of internet search… i will know
The gist of the many papers i found was this… if you have an agressive grade, chances are you may have cells collecting on the prostate periphery. Going surgery may leave these behind. Going radiation (with brachy boost) can mop up these outer cells sometimes.
Look it up. Do your research
Replies to "I read the paper you linked. I found it deceptive. It did not fully describe the..."
The NEJM multi-year (decade, decade and a half) study was discussed in a Prostate Cancer Research Institute webinar. I gathered that there was no statistically significant difference in outcomes between radiation and surgical treatments. I understand that if there were objective evidence (proofs) that one or the other produced statistically significant more favorable outcomes than the other, then less investors would gund the production & continuous improvement of the medical devices (e.g., robotic-assisted radical prostatectomy-RARP or MRI-guided radiotherapy) with less favorable long-term outcomes. As it is, production, sales, use and CI of devices for both procedures continue in parallel.
I hope this helps in our readers' analysis & decision-making on their treatment path.
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To get the low-level details you want (radiotherapy type, dose, etc.), you’ll have to research the actual clinical trials that they were reporting the results about.
I’ll leave it up you to tell the NEJM that you think their reporting is deceptive. (Don’t think you’ll get much traction with that….)
You used the word “identical” — (“….found NONE that supported the often reported mantra that two vastly different treatment techniques coincidentally yielded identical curative outcomes.” Rarely if ever will you find in scientific literature “identical” results, or even any reference to “identical” results. What you’ll find is whether there’s “statistical significance” to a result. (And, this report indicated that there is not a statistically significant difference in outcomes for localized prostate cancer.) Try to review scientific papers with a scientific mindset, not a lay mindset.
I did 9 years of researching medical literature while I was on active surveillance and more during these past 4 years since active treatment, and found many papers and many organizations and institutions reporting statistically equivalent outcomes between surgery vs radiation.
Of all the papers you said you researched, I would be interested in seeing a recent clinical, peer-reviewed paper (on par with the studies that the NEJM paper references) that indicates statistically different 15-year oncological outcomes for localized disease.