Adjuvant therapy in prostatic cancer.

Abstract

Prostatic cancer is an unusual malignancy because, commonly, it is slowly progressive and occurs at an age where the patient's life expectancy is short as a result of considerable competing mortality rates from other diseases. In addition, the place of radical surgery, i.e., radical prostatectomy is still not defined completely or established uniformly. This article attempts to offer comparisons of the initial forms of primary therapy and to determine the way in which adjuvant therapy may be tested and its results assessed. Additional information should come from large-scale randomized clinical trials involving several hundred patients in each treatment arm.