URO TODAY: The five main prostate cancer treatments can all have bad side effects, so a panel of 15 specialists have compared them and come up with some recommended improvements.
Prostate cancer (PC) is one of the tumours with the highest incidence in recent years. PC therapies have several adverse effects.
A panel consensus recommendation has been made to prevent or ameliorate complications in PC treatment to improve quality of life.
Fifteen specialists have met to analyse the different toxicities associated with PC treatment.
Each medical specialist searched National Library of Medicine PubMed citations about these secondary effects and his specialty from 1999 to 2009 to propose measures for their prevention/amelioration.
- Surgery is associated with incontinence and impotence.
- Radiotherapy can produce acute, late urological and gastrointestinal toxicity.
- Brachytherapy can produce acute urinary retention.
- Chemotherapy is associated with haematotoxicity. peripheral neuropathy and diarrhoea.
- And hormone therapy can produce osteoporosis, metabolic syndrome, cognitive and muscular alterations, cardiotoxicity, etc.
Improvement in surgical techniques and technology (IMRT/IGRT) can prevent surgical and radiotherapeutic toxicity, respectively.
Brachytherapy toxicity can be prevented with precise techniques to preserve the urethra.
Chemotherapy toxicity can be prevented with personalized schedules of treatment and close follow-up of iatrogenia
And hormone therapy toxicity can be prevented with close follow-up of possible secondary effects.
Prostablog 
I am a part of a start up (www.dynemobiosystems.com) that will shortly announce results of a study that will show that we can effectively predict which prostate cancer patients will not metastasize for greater than 10 years post diagnose. As such our tool will be effective at preventing unnecessary surgical and chemo treatments (with the ensuing side effects).