Brachytherapy or surgery? A composite view.
The treatment of prostate cancer presents the patient and clinician with several options. The choice of modality is often the most difficult. For low- and intermediate-risk disease, the choice is often between surgery and brachytherapy because the other major option, external-beam radiotherapy, has toxicity that generally only makes sense in the risk/benefit analysis for high-risk prostate cancer. The comparison of brachytherapy and surgery may be done on several levels. This review will focus the comparison on toxicity, the "soft" endpoints of biochemical relapse-free survival and clinical relapse-free survival, and the "hard" endpoint of prostate cancer-specific mortality.
Ciezki
Jay P
JP
Glickman Urologic and Kidney Institute, Cleveland Clinic, Cleveland, Ohio, USA. ciezkij@ccf.org
Klein
Eric A
EA
D001918:Brachytherapy; D002986:Clinical Trials as Topic; D006801:Humans; D053208:Kaplan-Meier Estimate; D008297:Male; D011468:Prostatectomy; D011471:Prostatic Neoplasms / Q000401:mortality / Q000532:radiotherapy* / Q000601:surgery*