[Advances in highly conformal radiotherapy for prostate cancer: past, current, and future]

Recent advance in the field of radiation oncology, especially in medical physics for radiation therapy (RT), has considerably improved treatment outcomes of various cancers including prostate cancer with regard to both of tumor control and morbidity. Three-dimensionally conformal RT with image-guided radiotherapeutic modalities for accurate tumor localization, such as brachytherapy, intensity-modulated radiation therapy (IMRT), and charged particle beam RT can thereby deliver a large dose to the tumor and allow the sparing of surrounding normal tissues. It is thought that prostate cancer is one of representative cancers which have been treated with RT as a curative intent and benefited from novel conformal RT techniques. Because the number of prostate cancer patients has been increasing year by year in Japan as results from wide spread of PSA screening and rapid change in life style, RT has been recently playing much more important roles in the curative treatment for patients with prostate cancer. Hence, we will review the outcomes of RT for prostate cancer and introduce the benefit of modern RT modalities from clinical aspect. In addition, our future prospect to further yield better disease control with minimum morbidity compared with present RT will be also mentioned in the report.