Encouraging New Study on Salvage Radiation

Varian linear accelerator.  

The March 2011 issue of Cancer, a journal from the American Cancer Society, carried promising news for all of us SRT (salvage radiotherapy) guys:  salvage radiation has been shown, for the first time, to confer a survival benefit across the patient population, and PSA doubling time did not matter significantly.   Some well-known doctors (D'Amico and Moul, for example) from Harvard and Dana Farber co-authored the study which looked at 519 men who had prostatectomies at Duke University between 1988 and 2008.  The median followup time was 11.3 years.  The way I understand hazard ratios, the results mean that the risk of death from all causes was roughly half that of men who did not have salvage radiation. 


http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21437885?s_cid=pubmed






















Photo courtesy digital cat: http://www.flickr.com/photos/14646075@N03/3798458685/. Used under Creative Commons license with thanks.