This article on the URO Today website covers the SUO session at the AUA 2019 meeting, where Dr Art Rastinehad discusses the selection of patients for focal therapy for their prostate cancer.
It highlights how focal therapy evolved from the overdiagnosis and overtreatment of prostate cancer in relation to the treatment's side effects, primarily sexual and urinary in nature.
Particular note should be paid to the diagram highlighting the various paradigms in relation to the risk associated with the cancer stage.
The main takeaways for clinicians were that patients eligible for focal therapy should have biopsy-confirmed imaging, biomarkers, and MRI imaging should be used with targeted biopsy in conjunction with the standard biopsy when evaluating patients, and patients should have a biopsy to confirm ablation by 1-year post-treatment.
Where does focal therapy fit into the paradigm?
In this slide presented at the SUO session by Dr Rastinehad, focal therapy is placed in the current and future paradigms in relation to the stage of a patient's prostate cancer in relation to risk. The paradigms include the current broad treatment options, focal therapy options, HIFU focal therapy, and NanoKnife focal therapy, into a specific one for focal therapy and look at a future potential paradigm. The cancer risk stages range from very low to very high, and look at how both active surveillance and radical therapies can be augmented by focal therapy as a defined treatment option.
