Radical prostatectomy in high-risk prostate cancer

One consistent finding in the studies regarding treating men with prostate cancer is that men with high-risk disease have the most to gain from treatment with curative intent. Men with high-risk or locally-advanced prostate cancer require treatment to the primary cancer or risk dying prematurely from their disease. Increasingly, combined androgen deprivation therapy + radiation treatment is seen as the standard treatment as a result of prospective studies in this space, and the perceived increased morbidity of radical prostatectomy in the setting of a "low" cure rate as monotherapy. In the absence of a well-conducted randomized trial, there is no definite evidence that one treatment is superior to the other. The advantages of radical prostatectomy are that it provides excellent local control of the primary tumor without an increase in morbidity, accurately stages the disease to guide further therapy, and removes benign sources of prostate-specific antigen so that failures can be promptly identified and subsequent treatment can be initiated in a timely manner. Although several guidelines recommend radiation treatment over radical prostatectomy as first-line treatment, there is no evidence that surgery is inferior and radical prostatectomy should remain part of any informed discussion regarding treatment options for men with high-risk prostate cancer.