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Hi I'm new to the forum, but not prostate cancer. I've tried many things (surgery, radiation, chemotherapy, hormone therapy and clinical trials) over the last three years no long term benefit.
In my researching various things I came across the Memorial Sloan Kettering Prostate Cancer Prediction Tools. I have been able to "test" the first three of them with my own case, but not the fourth. Anyone else tried to use these?
1) "probability of cancer remaining progression-free following radical prostatectomy or brachytherapy,"
2) " used to predict the probability that a patient's cancer will recur after radical prostatectomy; that is, the probability at two, five, seven, and ten years that the patient's serum PSA level will become detectable and begin to rise steadily"
3)" designed for men who have experienced a recurrence of their prostate cancer after treatment with radical prostatectomy. The tool predicts the probability the recurrence can be successfully treated with salvage radiation therapy (SRT), calculating the probability that the cancer will be controlled and the PSA will be undetectable six years after SRT."
and finally,
4) "used by patients with advanced, metastatic prostate cancer, who have a rising PSA and evidence of progression of their cancer despite maximal treatment with hormone therapy... to predict the probability of survival one and two years later based on a man's age, his PSA level, his performance status, and a variety of standard laboratory tests."
Is anyone else familiar with these tools and if so what is your experience with their value?
I am sorry to say that I will not be of much help to you because I did not have surgery, so could not test the various options.
I have over the years used a number of the Nomograms (incidentally, for anyone interetested there are a number listed here Prostate Cancer Calculators ) and found that the results were very inconsistent, which is understandable. After all the various calculatros are using different data and different interprtetations of that data.
I also found it very useful to understand clearly that the calculators demonstrate the median probable outcomes - and that it was more imprtant to understand the range of potential outcomes. It is also importan to try to establish when the data was gathered because of the effect of the so-called Gleason Migration that has occured over the past ten years or so following the decision to no longer label diagnoses with a Gleason Score below 6 after a needle biopsy as 'cancer'.
All in all I personally found little value in the calculators.
