Prognostic factors for carcinoma of the prostate

Prognostic factors for prostatic carcinoma should be significant, independent and clinically important. They should be of practical use, and their determination should be affordable in everday practice. Prognostic factors may be grouped into patient-related, tumor-related a nd treatment-related. They should meet certain requirements, such as possession of a clear biological significance, an adequate sample size (possibly more than 150 patients), no patient population bias, an adequate statistical test, such as Cox regression analysis, as well as optimized cut-off values and reproducibility. From a pathologist's view, prognostic factors with established values are grade, margin involvement, capsular penetration, seminal vesical involvement, metastases and invasion of fat in needle biopsies. In contrast to this, factors with little value are, among others, zone location or nuclear shape. If these guidelines for assessment of prognostic factors are not met, the prognostic factors grow exponentially, as an individual patient can only belong to one prognostic group. If one considers all th ree categories of prognostic factors together, the clinical stage matters most despite all uncertainties. The same holds true for grading; particularly, the well-differentiated grades on biopsy cores have the drawback of being reflected in the specimen only infrequently. The use of biomarkers to give a better prognostic information is also disappointing, as only PSA and PAP have a reliable value among 28 biomarkers. It is of note that new biomarkers are continuously being discovered and examined, such as cyclin A or D. Due to these deficiencies in all three categories of prognostic factors for prostatic carcinoma, prognostic indices in the form of nomograms were constructed. But, if these indices are employed to answer the most important question at the time of diagnosis, i.e., 'is this man a candidate for surveillance?', neoadjuvant treatment plus irradiation, neoadjuvant treatment plus radical prostatectomy, perineal radical prostatectomy, because of a low probability of extracapsular extension or positive lymph nodes, adjuvant therapy after local treatment with curative intent as opposed to progression-based treatment or immediate systemic treatment, let alone intermittent endocrine manipulation, are not reliably possible. The outcomes of the few available studies based on prognostic factors should be studied carefully. If considered, a valuable new way of estimating artificial neural networks is a possibility to come to practical terms. Copyright (C) 1999 S. Karger AG, Basel.