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I attended a prostate group meeting last year at which a local radiologist spoke. After listening to him about the recent advances in Brachy I would now personally go with Brachy vs radical if I had my choice to do at this time. Being in my late 50's I chose radical 4.5 years ago as it had the best long term survival rate at that time. Now apparently the two procedures cure at about the same rate.
I was 46 when I had seed implants. My urologist of course wanted to rip out the prostate, but I balked. After a while he advised that brachy should be fine for my condition. My family doctor just wanted me to do something, and was fine with brachy. I saw 2 radiation oncologists, and both were fine with performing brachy on a 46 year old. I chose the doctor who has performed in excess of 10,000 seed implants, and so far so good, but I am only 8 months post seeding. You can read more here if interested: http://www.yananow.org/display_story.php?id=924
Good luck to you, and take your time making a decision.
The most objective recent series of papers I have found addressing the difficult issue of comparing prostate cancer treatments are those from the Prostate Cancer Results Study Group. A summary of the group's rather rigorous evaluation criteria and results is available at:
It is perhaps unfortunate that the lead on papers from this group has been by Dr. Peter Grimm (Prostate Cancer Treatment Center, Seattle), as too often critics assume a bias towards brachytherapy, Dr. Grimm's specialty. However, the doctors in the study group include nationally recognized surgeons, oncologists, radiologists, and pathologists.
If anyone wants more details than in the web site above, I have PDF files of a 2011 slide presentation (which includes links to over 50 reference studies) and a 2012 paper in the British Journal of Urology, International.
Cheers!
Jon in Nevada
PS- Studies on treatment outcomes are confounded by the fact that any analysis of 10 or 15-year results mean that the technology used now is 10 to 15 years old. We never will be able to get past this limitation in using long-term studies to try and justify a particular 'gold standard' for prostate cancer treatment....
