Determinants of bone specific metastasis in prostate cancer

Prostate cancer is one of the most common type of cancer in Western countries. Although the majority of patients with PCa have a minimally aggressive disease, some of them will experience relapse and formation of metastasis. Bone metastasis are a major cause of quality of life impairment and death among patients with metastatic prostate cancer. Different "bone targeted therapies" and several follow-up strategies were developed in order to optimize bone metastasis prevention and treatment. Nevertheless there is still a great clinical need of identifying patients more likely to benefit from those interventions as not all patients will develop metastatic disease and not all patients with metastatic disease will develop bone metastasis. Here we review markers predictive of bone metastasis occurrence that have been tested in clinical settings, particularly focusing on the ability of such markers to predict bone metastasis over visceral metastasis occurrence.