A recent study found that some cases of prostate cancer have been overrated and some men suffering from this form of cancer needn't have gone through surgical interventions. Half of the US men who got surgery or radiation treatment for prostate might have as well lived without actively treating prostate cancer. The consequences and results would have been the same as in the case of surgical intervention.

Scientists at the University of Michigan draw attention of both patients and doctors that tumor progression can widely vary among patients and they should think twice before resorting to surgery or chemotherapy.

Study co-researcher Dr. David C. Miller stated that "there is a great paradigm shift occurring in prostate cancer. There are some cancers for which treatment will clearly be beneficial. In other cases, we can avoid aggressive treatment, with all its side effects."

The scientists who signed the study published today in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute noted that further study is needed for deciding what patients really need to go through such aggressive treatment and who can lead a happy life without going through chemotherapy or surgery. "The motivation for the study was that we have learned more about how frequent side effects of treatment are, and what the best therapies are," explained Professor Miller.

In the study, researchers investigated medical data from more than 64,000 men, who have been diagnosed with prostate cancer and were registered at the US National Cancer Institute. They found that age played a key role in deciding whether a man should go through aggressive treatment or not.

Therefore, most men under the age of 55 were most likely to need surgical intervention instead of "sitting and waiting". On the other hand, men over 70 who had prostate cancer, but a low risk one, were most likely to go through radiation treatment even if they might as well lived with the tumor and died of something else besides prostate cancer. However, larger studies and investigations are needed, the authors noted, as "there are tens of thousands of men for whom this decision is relevant."

"It is clear that the number of lower-risk patients who receive initial aggressive therapy is not trivial. We have to ask the question whether this is too much treatment for some of these men. In our view, if the treatment decision is inappropriate for an individual patient, then no matter how skillfully surgery is performed or radiation is delivered, it is poor-quality treatment. For this reason, efforts to reduce overtreatment should be a clinical and public health priority," researchers involved in the study concluded.