[Studies on prognosis of prostate cancer with bone metastasis by using pretreatment bone scintigraphy]

The pretreatment bone scans on 40 patients with prostate cancer with bone involvement were reviewed and the prognostic impact of the initial extent of bone metastasis was evaluated. On the bases of the number or extent of bone metastasis, the patients were divided into 2 groups and survival for each group was compared. We also assessed the correlations between the extent on bone metastasis and other pretreatment characteristics: age, symptoms, serum acid phosphatase, serum alkaline phosphatase, and the histological differentiation of primary tumor. At the same time, the prognostic impacts of these pretreatment characteristics were evaluated. The extent of bone metastasis on the scan correlated with survival, but other characteristics did not have a predictive value except for histological grade. Though the histological differentiation of primary tumor was related to survival, the survival rates differed by the initial extent of disease among the same histological grade patients. Thus the extent of bone metastasis was shown to predict survival in metastatic prostate cancer.