Patients who underwent treatment with Cyberknife demonstrated a 5-year disease control rate of 96%, compared with 95% among patients who underwent conventional radiation therapy.
Cyberknife treatment, also known as Stereotactic body radiation therapy (SBRT), can treat prostate cancer in just 5 treatment sessions. Radiation is delivered in higher doses over those treatment sessions. Recent research confirmed the safety and treatment effectiveness in patients with prostate cancer and compared it with conventional radiation therapy, which is delivered in lower doses over several weeks.
The results from the study showed that patients who underwent treatment with Cyberknife had better disease control at 5 years (96% cancer free) than those individuals who had conventional radiation therapy (95%).
“Standard radiation treatment is already highly effective and is very well tolerated in people with localized prostate cancer. But for a health care system and for patients, to have this treatment delivered just as effectively in 5 days as opposed to 4 weeks has huge implications,” said principal investigator Nicholas van As, MD, in a news release on the findings. van As is a clinical oncologist and medical director of The Royal Marsden NHS Foundation Trust and a professor at the Institute of Cancer Research in London, the United Kingdom.
This new study followed 874 patients in the United States and Canada who had localized prostate cancer and underwent radiotherapy due to preference or being unsuitable for surgery. The participants who underwent SBRT/Cyberknife treatment had only 5 treatments over 1 to 2 weeks vs those who had traditional radiation therapy had up to 39 treatments over seven and a half weeks.
At 5-year follow-up, the investigators assessed the rate of patients who had no increase in PSA levels, or other evidence of recurrence, or prostate cancer-specific mortality. Those who had the 5 higher dose treatments had better outcomes with similarly low side effects.
