Advanced prostatic carcinoma: pulmonary manifestations

To clarify the role of standard chest radiography in prostatic adenocarcinoma, the pulmonary manifestations of 198 patients with Stage D disease were evaluated. All patients were treated with chemotherapeutic protocols allowing for adequate clinical and radiographic correlation. Retrospective interpretation of serial chest radiographs revealed that 35% of our patients had visible intrathoracic abnormalities; however, only 24% of the patients had abnormalities attributable to intrathoracic metastases. Twenty-two percent of patients had pleural effusions, 16% reticular opacities, 3.5% reticulonodular opacities, 8% isolated or discrete pulmonary nodules, and 4.5% adenopathy. Etiologies of these opacities included metastatic disease in 93.5% of those with adenopathy and nodular or reticulonodular opacities, but 39% of pleural effusions and 52% of reticular opacities were best attributed to concomitant processes. Four patients had intrathoracic metastases without bone metastases. Standard chest radiography is a valuable screening procedure that should be correlated with clinical data to differentiate metastases from concomitant processes.