MedPage Today is reporting on a JAMA study due out in the morning. This is essentially what I was pointing to yesterday -- when I wrote that some doctors now believe a "wait and see" approach is better, for many types of prostate cancer. Let's hope this learning is fully reflected in tomorrow's FDA Advisory Committee meetings. We'll have it here, either way, though -- count on that.
A bit of the reporting runs thus -- do go read it all:
. . . .Active surveillance for low-risk prostate cancer provides better quality of life than any immediate treatment, researchers found.
A hypothetical 65-year-old with newly diagnosed, clinically localized, low-risk prostate cancer would get at least an additional six months of quality-adjusted life expectancy from active surveillance compared with any treatment strategy with curative intent, according to a decision analysis published in the Dec. 1 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association. . . .The results were robust under a wide range of assumptions, even assuming a higher probability of prostate cancer death or progressive disease during active surveillance, Julia H. Hayes, MD, of the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston, and colleagues reported.
"This benefit reflects the deferred and substantially lower incidence of adverse effects of treatment experienced by men under active surveillance," they wrote. . . .
Fascinating. We'll have the streaming web-video feed of the FDA advisory panel's meeting up here, in the morning. Do stop back.
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