Increasingly, we are seeing younger men diagnosed with prostate cancer and with bone metastases. One of the more common therapies, radiotherapy is recognized for its effect on local control of bone metastases, but whether it could prolong overall survival, the gold standard is still controversial.

Researchers retrospectively evaluated 113 men with prostate cancer and bone metastases who were younger than 70 years of age to see if radiotherapy extended their survival.

They found that the 1-, 2-, 3-, 5-, 7- and 10-year survival rates showed no significant difference between a control group and those who had radiotherapy. They did find that when they performed a multivariate COX regression the overall survival was actually associated with alkaline phosphatase when bone metastases occurred and the number of bone metastases that a man had in their body.

They concluded that given the advances in other life-prolonging treatments of metastatic prostate cancer, radiotherapy may not be the first choice for young bone metastatic prostate cancer patients in order to improve survival.

http://translational-medicine.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12967-016-0868-y