How successful is prostate brachytherapy?

The right treatment for you will depend on the stage of your cancer, your age, possible side effects, quality of life considerations, whether your disease might potentially develop over time, and of course, your own personal preferences. The Medical Team at The Prostate Brachytherapy Centre will discuss all your treatment options with you.

Prostate brachytherapy is one of three types of radical therapies that are commonly used to treat localised prostate cancer (that is, prostate cancer that has not spread outside the prostate gland). Brachytherapy has been used to treat patients with localised prostate cancer in the USA for over 20 years, so we have long-term results from the treatment of these first patients which show that this form of treatment is highly effective in treating patients with early prostate cancer.

Brachytherapy has been shown to be just as effective at curing prostate cancer as the other conventional radical treatments, such as surgery (radical prostatectomy) or external beam radiotherapy (EBRT).

How successful is prostate brachytherapy?

However, none of the available radical therapies can always guarantee a complete removal of the cancer.

Even if you have a radical prostatectomy to remove the whole of your prostate gland there is still a chance that not all the cancer cells will have been removed and your cancer may return. The success rates for each of the three radical treatments have been shown to be the same in a number of studies in the USA involving many thousands of men.

How successful is prostate brachytherapy?

For example, one research study of nearly 3,000 patients with early prostate cancer was carried out in the USA between 1990 and 1998. The success rates known as relapse free survival (the percentage of patients who would be expected to be free of prostate cancer 5 or 7 years after treatment) are shown below:

The effectiveness of prostate brachytherapy for successful treatment of prostate cancer, coupled with its low side effect profile is the reason why it is the most commonly requested and performed treatment for early prostate cancer in the USA.