EAU 2018: Radical Prostatectomy for (Oligo) Metastatic Prostate Cancer

Copenhagen, Denmark (UroToday.com) Dr. Christian Stief from Germany provided a provocative presentation discussing radical prostatectomy for oligometastatic prostate cancer. Dr. Stief started by noting that among patients in the Munich cancer registry, those with node positive disease that under radical prostatectomy have a 95% 5-year survival rate, compared to 70% of patients that have node positive disease that do not undergo radical prostatectomy. Similarly, 10-year survival is 86% for those undergoing radical prostatectomy compared to 40% for those not undergoing radical prostatectomy. Additional analyses from the Munich registry shows that patients with bone metastasis and concomitant visceral metastases have a poor median survival ~8 months. Dr. Stief then highlighted that prostate cancer metastases kill >99% of patients dying of prostate cancer, with a hypothesis that the primary tumor seeds bone metastases. Thus, the justification for considering radical prostatectomy among patients that have metastatic disease is that immediate removal of the primary site avoids further metastatic seeding.

In their institution, Dr. Stief notes that they have performed 85 radical prostatectomies for patients with bone metastasis since 2011. The median age of these patients was 66 years (range 46-80 years), median PSA was 56 ng/mL without hormonal therapy and 13.4 ng/mL for patients on ADT. Among these patients, 27 had oligometastases and 58 patients had polymetastases. The median surgical time for radical prostatectomy was 84.2 minutes (range 54-221), the transfusion rate was 4.7%, median catheter time was 8.7 days (range 6-30 days), and bladder neck contracture rate was 24.7%. There were 20 patients with pathologic Gleason 8 disease, 47 with Gleason 9, and 11 with Gleason 10. There were a median 13.5 lymph nodes removed with lymph node positivity in 60% of the patients (mean 13 lymph nodes removed for those pN+; mean 11 lymph nodes removed for pN0). Over a median follow-up of 19 months, 55% of patients were without pads, 21% used one pad per day, 9% used two pads/day and 14% used >2 pads/day. Four patients were dead of disease, all patients that had polymetastases at the time of radical prostatectomy. One patient had pathologic pN+ disease, one had pathologic Gleason 9 and three were Gleason 10. As part of evolving standard of care, three patients received radiation to the bone metastases and several received Radium-223.

Dr. Stief concluded with several take home points:

  • Small volume cancers may seed bone metastases
  • Bone metastases occur in the absence of lymph node metastases
  • Aggressive multimodal approaches for aggressive prostate cancers may yield a survival benefit, but the jury is still out

Presented by: Christian Stief, University Hospital Munich-Grosshadern, Ludwig-Maximilians-University, Munich, Germany

Written by: Zachary Klaassen, MD, Urologic Oncology Fellow, University of Toronto, Princess Margaret Cancer Centre, twitter: @zklaassen_md at the 2018 European Association of Urology Meeting EAU18, 16-20 March, 2018 Copenhagen, Denmark