TUESDAY, Aug. 29 (HealthDay News) -- In newly diagnosed prostate cancer patients, bone metastases are uncommon, according to a study published in the August issue of Urology.
Andrea Salonia, M.D., of the University Vita-Salute San Raffaele in Milan, Italy, and colleagues studied 1,587 prostate cancer patients who underwent conventional technetium-99m methylene diphosphonate scintigraphy. They identified 1,242 patients who had complete retrospective data collection for statistical analysis.
The researchers found that 1,208 (97.3 percent) of the analyzable patients had negative bone scans and that 31 (2.5 percent) had bone metastases. They compared the clinical and pathologic features of patients with skeletal involvement with those of a sub-cohort of 372 patients with no skeletal involvement.
"Our data have confirmed that bone metastases are more frequent in patients with high prostate-specific antigen levels and poorly differentiated tumors at biopsy regardless of the patient's age," the authors conclude. "A history of previous non-prostate primary neoplasms and the use of H2 blockers seemed to be more prevalent in those patients with bone metastases at diagnosis."
Abstract
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