Dr Joe O'Sullivan: We Are Getting Better at Treating Prostate Cancer Earlier

Transcript

New therapies and imaging modalities have helped providers treat patients who have prostate cancer earlier, said Joe O'Sullivan, MD, FRCR, clinical professor, School of Medicine, Dentistry and Biomedical Sciences, Queen's University Belfast.

Are we getting better at identifying patients with prostate cancer who are likely to relapse and who might need treatment intensification?

I think we are. I think the reason we are getting better at that is because now we have therapies for those patients. When I started treating prostate cancer, first, there really wasn’t a huge benefit in finding out early that somebody had metastasized, because all we had was castration therapy. Now that we have multiple therapies, and also now that we are also getting more ambitious with treatment like stereotactic radiotherapy for oligometastatic prostate cancer, there’s now good value in discovering recurrences at an earlier stage.

In tandem with that, as well as therapeutic research going well, we have a lot of new imaging modalities—whole body MRI, PSMA-PET scans—these are helping us to see a bit deeper inside the patient and maybe identify disease at an earlier stage when it might benefit from therapy.