Prostate choice may over-focus on age

SAN FRANCISCO, Dec. 27 (UPI) -- U.S. researchers suggest age may play too key a role in prostate cancer treatment among older men.

Researchers at the University of California, San Francisco, say men age 75 and older with high-risk prostate cancer more often have treatments based on chronologic age than disease risk.

However the study, published in the Journal of Clinical Oncology, found when older, high-risk men received more aggressive treatment, they had a 46 percent lower death rate vs. the same type of patients treated more conservatively.

"There is a disconnect between risk and treatment decisions among older men," senior investigator Dr. Matthew Cooperberg said in a statement. "We found that under-treatment of older-men with high-risk disease might in part explain higher rates of cancer mortality in this group. There is also pervasive over-treatment of low-risk disease in this age group."

Cooperberg and colleagues studied men in the Cancer of the Prostate Strategic Urologic Research Endeavor database -- a longitudinal, observational disease registry of men with prostate cancer recruited from urology practices throughout the United States -- which contained information on 13,805 patients.