Results from the largest study of men with prostate cancer treated with high-dose, intensity modulated radiation therapy (IMRT) show that the majority // of patients remain alive with no evidence of disease after an average follow-up period of eight years.

The 561 prostate cancer patients treated with IMRT at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center were classified into prognostic risk groups. After an average of eight years, 89 percent of the men in the favorable risk group were disease-free and none of the men in any group developed secondary cancers as a result of the radiation therapy. This report, published in the October 2006 issue of The Journal of Urology, is the first description of long-term outcomes for prostate cancer patients using IMRT.

"Our results suggest that IMRT should be the treatment of choice for delivering high-dose, external beam radiotherapy for patients with localized prostate cancer," said Dr. Michael J. Zelefsky, Chief of the Brachytherapy Service at Memorial Sloan-Kettering. "We were able to show long-term safety and long-term efficacy in a very diverse group of prostate cancer patients that we followed – many for as long as ten years. Despite the fact that some patients had an aggressive form of their disease with high Gleason scores and PSA (prostate specific antigen) levels, the overwhelming majority of patients had good tumor control with neither recurrence of their original cancer nor development of second cancers, which one might have expected from the high doses of radiation," he added.

Pre-treatment diagnostic evaluations were performed for all of the patients to better define their clinically localized prostate cancer. They were classified into prognostic risk groups as defined by the National Comprehensive Cancer Network guidelines (http://www.nccn.org). These are based on clinical characteristics including age, T stage, Gleason score, PSA level, and pre-treatment with neoadjuvant androgen depr
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