title: Adjuvant therapy in prostatic cancer.
abstract: BACKGROUND
  Prostatic cancer is an unusual malignancy because, commonly, it is slowly progressive and occurs at an age where the patient's life expectancy is short as a result of considerable competing mortality rates from other diseases. In addition, the place of radical surgery, i.e., radical prostatectomy is still not defined completely or established uniformly.
  
  
  METHODS
  This article attempts to offer comparisons of the initial forms of primary therapy and to determine the way in which adjuvant therapy may be tested and its results assessed.
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  Additional information should come from large-scale randomized clinical trials involving several hundred patients in each treatment arm.
authors.affiliation: St. James's University Hospital, Leeds, County Yorkshire, UK.
authors.forename: P H
authors.initials: PH
authors.lastname: Smith
authors.forename: M K
authors.initials: MK
authors.lastname: Parmar
mesh_terms: D003131:Combined Modality Therapy; D005500:Follow-Up Studies; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D009367:Neoplasm Staging; D011379:Prognosis; D011468:Prostatectomy; D011471:Prostatic Neoplasms / Q000401:mortality / Q000473:pathology / Q000628:therapy*; D016032:Randomized Controlled Trials as Topic