- Center on Health Equity & Access
- Clinical
- Health Care Cost
- Health Care Delivery
- Insurance
- Policy
- Technology
- Value-Based Care
Brachytherapy Improves PFS and Is Cost-Effective in Prostate Cancer, Study Reports
While brachytherapy improved progression-free survival in men with prostate cancer, compared with traditional readiotherapy, the study found that overall survival was not very different between the 2 groups.
A prostate cancer treatment using permanently implanted radioactive “seeds” doubles rates of 5-year tumour-free survival compared with conventional high-dose radiotherapy, a study has found.
Low-dose-rate prostate brachytherapy (LDR-PB) involves the insertion of tiny radioactive implants into the prostate gland. A trial comparing the treatment with dose-escalated external beam radiotherapy found that it was much more successful at banishing cancer. Men who underwent LDR-PB were twice as likely to be cancer-free 5 years later. Scientists studied 398 men with cancer that had not spread outside the prostate gland who were judged to be at high risk of treatment failure based on standard test results.
Lead researcher Professor James Morris, from Vancouver Cancer Centre in Canada, said: “At five years follow-up, we saw a large advantage in progression-free survival in the LDR-PB group.
Link to the complete article on The Guardian: http://bit.ly/1EciTDF
Managed Care Reflections: A Q&A With A. Mark Fendrick, MD, and Michael E. Chernew, PhD
December 2nd 2025To mark the 30th anniversary of The American Journal of Managed Care (AJMC), each issue in 2025 includes a special feature: reflections from a thought leader on what has changed—and what has not—over the past 3 decades and what’s next for managed care. The December issue features a conversation with AJMC Co–Editors in Chief A. Mark Fendrick, MD, director of the Center for Value-Based Insurance Design and a professor at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor; and Michael E. Chernew, PhD, the Leonard D. Schaeffer Professor of Health Care Policy and the director of the Healthcare Markets and Regulation Lab at Harvard Medical School in Boston, Massachusetts.
Read More
