J Cancer 2020; 11(19):5738-5745. doi:10.7150/jca.38323 This issue Cite
Research Paper
1. Department of Urology, Institute of Urology and National Clinical Research Center for Geriatrics, West China Hospital, Sichuan University, No. 37 Guoxue Xiang, Chengdu 610041, China.
2. Center of Biomedical big data, West China Hospital, Sichuan University, Chengdu, Sichuan, China.
*These authors contributed equally to this study.
Background: For localized prostate cancer (PCa) with a low disease burden, whole-gland resection seems like overtreatment, while focal therapy, including cryosurgery, can achieve similar outcomes. We aimed at comparing the long-term survival outcomes of cryotherapy and radical prostatectomy (RP) and further exploring whether RP can be replaced by cryosurgery for those with low-risk PCa.
Methods: We conducted analyses from the Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results (SEER) database (2004-2015) and performed propensity score matching and used an instrumental variate to reduce the influence of bias and unmeasured confounders to the greatest extent.
Results: In the multivariate regression, patients who received cryotherapy had higher risk of overall mortality (OM) (hazard ratio [HR] = 2.52, 95% confidence interval [CI] 1.99-3.20, p < 0.001), but no significant difference was observed in decreasing cancer-specific mortality (CSM) (HR = 1.38, 95% CI 0.63-3.03, p = 0.41) after adjusting the confounders. After propensity score matching, patients who underwent cryotherapy had higher OM and CSM rates (HR = 2.70 [95% CI 1.99-3.66, p < 0.001] and HR = 2.99 [95% CI 1.19-7.48, p = 0.02], respectively). In the IV-adjusted analyses, RP was superior to cryotherapy in decreasing OM (HR = 2.52, 95% CI 1.99-3.20), while no obvious decrease of CSM was observed in the comparison of RP and cryotherapy (HR = 1.38, 95% CI 0.63-3.03). The subgroup analyses showed that RP displayed an obvious benefit in decreasing CSM (HR = 5.02, 95% CI 1.30-19.39, p = 0.02) for those with a prostate-specific antigen (PSA) level higher than 10 ng/ml.
Conclusion: RP ranked as the best treatment in regard to tumor control, but the advantages of cryotherapy became evident when taking functional and oncological outcomes into account, especially for low- and intermediate-risk PCa with low PSA levels.
Keywords: Cryotherapy, Radical Prostatectomy, Localized, Prostate Cancer