Use of Costly Prostate Cancer Treatments Climbs, Report Says
The use of costly treatments for prostate cancer among men who are unlikely to die from it increased from 2004 to 2009, despite uncertainty about the benefits of such treatments, according to a study published Tuesday in the Journal of American Medicine. The researchers concluded that the increase in the use of costly treatment options likely resulted from "aggressive direct-to-consumer marketing," financial incentives to use such treatments and the general perception that more expensive treatment options -- such as IMRT or robotic prostatectomy -- had replaced less-costly treatments, such as EBRT and open radical prostatectomy.
- "High-Tech Tx Overused in Low-Risk Prostate Cancer?" (Struck, MedPage Today, 6/25).