A recent scientific report has confirmed that there is no association between localized prostate cancer’s clinical stage and a patient’s risk of cancer relapse after having his prostate removed.

The main aim of staging prostate cancers is to aid the health care professionals to determine a patient’s prognosis.

It can be assumed that a more advanced clinical stage may point towards the greater risk of the relapse of prostate cancer after treatment. But on the contrary researchers have found that clinical stage is of questionable utility for predicting disease recurrence after surgical removal of the prostate in patients with localized prostate cancer. Radical prostatectomies have the highest tendency of preventing the relapse of prostate cancer.

Adam Reese, MD, of the University of California, San Francisco, and his colleagues challenged the earlier reports on the same subject and they questioned whether staging errors are responsible for this discrepancy.

They also questioned that do medical practitioners frequently error while staging prostate cancer cases and does this result in wrongly predicting the outcomes of the prostate cancer?

in a multi-institutional national disease registry, the investigators found that clinical stage was assigned incorrectly in 35.4 percent of 3,875 men.

The majority of these staging errors occurred because physicians frequently disregarded the results of trans-rectal ultrasound tests and incorrectly incorporated biopsy results when assigning stage.

Dr. Reese said that “Our findings question the utility of our current staging system for localized prostate cancer”. Because even after rectifying these staging mistakes, however, there was no link between clinical stage and prostate cancer relapse after surgically removal of prostate.

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