Overall Survival in Patients with Localized Prostate Cancer in the US Veterans Health Administration: Is PIVOT Generalizable?

Abstract

A better understanding of overall survival among patients with clinically localized prostate cancer (PCa) in the US Veterans Health Administration (VHA) is critical to inform PCa treatment decisions, especially in light of data from the Prostate Intervention Versus Observation Trial (PIVOT). We sought to describe patterns of survival for all patients with clinically localized PCa treated by the VHA. We created an analytic cohort of 35 954 patients with clinically localized PCa diagnosed from 1995 to 2001, approximating the PIVOT inclusion criteria (age of diagnosis ≤75 yr and clinical stage T2 or lower). Mean patient age was 65.9 yr, and median follow-up was 161 mo. Overall, 22.5% of patients were treated with surgery, 16.6% were treated with radiotherapy, and 23.1% were treated with androgen deprivation. Median survival of the entire cohort was 14 yr (25th, 75th percentiles, range: 7.9-20 yr). Among patients who received treatment with curative intent, median survival was 17.9 yr following surgery and 12.9 yr following radiotherapy. One-third of patients died within 10 yr of diagnosis compared with nearly half of the participants in PIVOT. This finding sounds a note of caution when generalizing the mortality data from PIVOT to VHA patients and those in the community. More than one-third of patients diagnosed with clinically localized prostate cancer treated through the US Veterans Health Administration from 1995 to 2001 died within 10 yr of their diagnosis. Caution should be used when generalizing the estimates of competing mortality data from PIVOT.