WEDNESDAY, March 19, 2003 (HealthDayNews) -- Younger people with prostate cancer don't necessarily have a poorer chance of survival than older people.
That's the good news from a study in the current issue of the International Journal of Radiation Oncology, Biology and Physics.
The traditional view is that younger people diagnosed with prostrate cancer earlier have more aggressive tumors.
Dr. Peter A.S. Johnstone, of the Naval Medical Center in San Diego, and his colleagues analyzed records from the Department of Defense Center for Prostate Disease Research to determine disease-free survival rates of prostate cancer patients who had radiation therapy.
They examined the records of 1,018 people who had T1-T3 prostate cancer and were treated with radiation therapy between 1988 and 2000. The median follow-up was 85.3 months as of Dec. 31, 2001.
The study found that age didn't have a significant effect on disease-free survival.
"Along with the bias that younger patients are more at risk, there is also a perception that younger patients are better suited to surgery than radiation therapy," Johnstone says in a news release. "While our results did not allow us to draw any conclusions about the effectiveness of radiation versus surgery, this study questions the view that age should have any influence on the selection of treatment modality,"
More information
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