Radiotherapy of prostatic cancer

Radiotherapy of prostatic cancer is an alternative curative treatment of localized disease to the radical prostatectomy. It is used mainly for patients in worse health condition and with life expectancy under 10 years. The main radiation technique is an external irradiation, with exploitation of 3-dimensional planning and using of conformal radiotherapy or IMRT. The efficacy of treatment depends first of all on the dose of irradiation. Besides the curative radiotherapy, irradiation is used as adjuvant postoperative radiotherapy for patients with locally advanced disease, reducing the percentage of local relapses, even though in the opinion of majority of authors it has no influence on overall survival. Palliative radiotherapy is used to control the pain of patients with metastatic disease. (author)