United States – Men suffering from prostate cancer and treated with internal radiotherapy, or brachytherapy, are more likely not to be victims of a relapse.

The team of Dr. Stock’s Mount Sinai Medical Center in New York studied 742 monitoring patients with prostate cancer. All were treated with brachytherapy alone or combined with hormone therapy or external radiotherapy between 1991 and 2002.

None of these patients had relapsed within five years after treatment. Only 3% of patients relapsed after five years, but have developed metastases. Measurement of the level of prostate-specific antigen (PSA) five years after treatment would be a good indicator of the patient’s health in the future and the risk of developing a new cancer in the following ten years.

While external beam radiotherapy is to target the radiation outside the patient, brachytherapy involves the implantation of radioactive elements near the cancerous tumor. The irradiation of cancer cells is limited to the area of the tumor to preserve the surrounding healthy tissue.