Current trends in the management of localised prostate cancer

The incidence of prostate cancer in the UK is increasing, and the disease is being detected more often in younger patients (e.g. from routine PSA measurement during health-care screening). Left untreated, a significant proportion of patients will undergo progression of their disease locally and/or develop metastases. Modern imaging techniques have greatly aided the assessment of early prostatic cancer, enabling both accurate assessment of the primary tumour and giving valuable information regarding lymph node metastases. PSA measurements are also extremely helpful, and this has replaced acid phosphatase as a marker for prostatic malignancy. Controversy still remains, however, over the best form of management. Radical prostatectomy undoubtedly produces the best results in the literature, but the patients are highly selected (e.g. those with nodal metastases are excluded) and some patients with well differentiated tumours may have been over-treated, as they may have been expected to do well with surveillance alone. Full clinical trials are required in identically staged patients to assess the relative merits of surveillance, radiotherapy and surgery, and this should now be possible with recent advances in imaging techniques.