Prostate Cancer
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CyberKnife® Prostate Radiosurgery
Early Stage Disease: Summary
CyberKnife® prostate radiosurgery effectively addresses shortcomings of other treatments for early stage prostate cancer. It is less invasive, with faster recovery than radical prostatectomy, vastly shorter in duration and with sharper treatment margins compared with external beam radiotherapy, potentially less urologically traumatic and obstructive than permanent source brachytherapy, and less invasive than HDR brachytherapy.
Though our specific CyberKnife® prostate radiosurgery fractionation schedule matches a peer-reviewed, published effective HDR brachytherapy monotherapy schedule (9), even that reference study may be criticized for its relatively short 35 month median follow-up, and there is still very little clinical experience with this hypofractionation schedule compared with standard protracted radiotherapeutic (EBRT) approaches. Because of the lack of long term data, for the foreseeable future, we will be offering CyberKnife® prostate radiosurgery monotherapy under an approved clinical trial, limited to favorable and selected intermediate prognosis patients, to help to define its cure rate as rapidly as possible, and better assess its quality of life impact on prostate cancer patients.
Written by Donald B. Fuller, M.D. – Radiation Oncologist