Dr Thompson and the team at St George Hospital / University of NSW have received ethics approval to commence a large study of over 1,200 patients who have undergone brachytherapy over the past 15+ years. The research team will be focussing their analysis on two key questions:
1) What are the long-term outcomes and what are the key predictors of success (cure) and failure (local / distant recurrence) over the long-term in terms of factors such as the number of biopsies containing cancer, the maximal amount of cancer in any core, the overall grade and highest grade of cancer, etc?
2) In men with urinary difficulties prior to brachytherapy, who undergo a small procedure to ‘unblock the prostate’ (i.e. mini-TURP/ bladder neck incision/ middle lobe resection) what are the long-term urinary outcomes compared to men who do not require these procedures prior to brachytherapy.
This study will analyse hundreds of data points across over a thousand patients to provide contemporary information about brachytherapy outcomes which will aid urologists, radiation oncologists and men with prostate cancer in the shared decision-making process for newly diagnosed localised prostate cancer. We expect to present results within the next 6 months.