A shorter course of prostate cancer radiotherapy, involving fewer hospital visits and higher individual doses of radiotherapy, is just as effective as the current standard treatment for both survival and quality of life, according to a new report in the Lancet Oncology.
The study, led by a team at London's Institute of Cancer Research and the Royal Marsden National Health Service (NHS) Foundation Trust, compared the standard radiotherapy schedule of 37 doses of 2 Grays per day with two other regimes -- one delivering 19 doses of 3 Gray per day, and the other 20 doses of 3 Gray per day. The researchers of the 14-year trial said the new treatment schedule of a 20-dose course trumps the standard 37.
The findings of the study, which was funded by Cancer Research UK, supports a change in clinical practice for prostate cancer radiotherapy with the 20-dose schedule becoming the new standard.
The new regime for prostate cancer would save 17 hospital trips and complex radiotherapy treatments for each patient, leading to a reduction nationally of more than 150,000 visits per year, the study team found.
The trial followed more than 3,200 men being treated for prostate cancer between 2002 and 2011 at more than 70 research centers across the U.K. and showed after five years, the 20-dose schedule was not inferior to the 37-dose schedule for treatment effectiveness or quality of life.
The trial also showed that treatment with fewer, higher doses of intensity-modulated radiotherapy was associated with less than half the rate of side-effects of older conformal radiotherapy.
