Active Surveillance for Localized Prostate Cancer: An Update

For men with favorable-risk prostate cancer, active surveillance — a strategy of prospectively assessing changes in disease biology, stage, and grade to determine the need for curative intervention — has increasingly become an alternative consideration to immediate therapy in selected patients with low-risk prostate cancer.

Now, to provide more robust data on outcomes associated with active surveillance, investigators report updated results of a prospective, single-center, single-arm, cohort study of this strategy in patients with low- and selected intermediate-risk prostate cancer (NEJM JW Oncol Hematol Dec 22 2009 and J Clin Oncol 2010; 1:126). The prior study followed 450 patients for a median of 6.8 years (range, 1–13 years). The current…