Should we affraid of induced cancer in group of patients after radical radiotherapy of prostate cancer?

Abstract

Radiotherapy is one of the basic methods of radical treatment of prostate cancer. Because of that getting to know all factors of post-radiation complications, and in consequence the possibility to limit them, is one of the challenges of contemporary radiotherapy.

One of the potential complications associated with radiation treatment is radiation-induced cancer. Despite a whole range of epidemiological analyses there is still lacking a fully credible model that would allow one to estimate the magnitude of risk of inducing such cancers. The last decades have seen the entry into clinical practice of technologically advanced methods of radiation therapy, such as the 3DCRT and IMRT. As the previous epidemiological analyses refer mainly to older radiation techniques, there is still a lack of credible data estimating the risk of inducing secondary cancers for new techniques, and in particular IMRT. It should be emphasized that IMRT allows one to escalate the dose, which may contribute to the improvement of radiotherapy effectiveness. From this there follows a new problem to be solved in future, i.e. how the escalation of the dose may influence the magnitude of risk of radiation carcinogenesis.

The problem of carcinogenesis may concern the group of younger patients for whom long survival is very likely, and the competitive edge of RT relative to surgery, in particular in the aspect of late complications, has to be thoroughly justified.