ANN ARBOR, Mich., Aug. 16 (UPI) -- About half of U.S. men with lower-risk prostate cancer received surgery or radiation when a wait-and-see approach would have been an option, a study finds.
Researchers looked at 64,112 men diagnosed with early stage prostate cancer, using the Surveillance, Epidemiology and End Results registry, a population-based cancer registry maintained by the National Cancer Institute. Men were divided into high-risk or low-risk categories, based on characteristics of their tumors.
Among the 24,835 men with lower-risk cancers, 55 percent were treated with initial surgery or radiation, which can have complications.
"Just as a failure to treat a potentially lethal prostate cancer is generally considered inappropriate from a quality-of-care perspective, overtreatment of lower-risk cancers is also not in the patient's best interest," says study author Dr. John T. Wei, of the University of Michigan Medical School. "For some men with early stage prostate cancer, surgery or radiation therapy may result in substantial negative effects without a survival benefit."
The study, published in Journal of the National Cancer Institute, says that for men with lower-risk cancers active surveillance involves frequent monitoring of the tumor without immediate active treatment.
