Video: Dr Cooperberg’s article commentary on prostate cancer treatment

Primary treatments for clinically localised prostate cancer: a comprehensive lifetime cost-utility analysis

Matthew R. Cooperberg, Naren R. Ramakrishna^†, Steven B. Duff*, Kathleen E. Hughes^‡, Sara Sadownik^‡, Joseph A. Smith^§ and Ashutosh K. Tewari^¶

Departments of Urology and Epidemiology and Biostatistics, UCSF Helen Diller Family Comprehensive Cancer Center, San Francisco, CA, *Veritas Health Economics Consulting, Inc., Carlsbad, CA, ^†Department of Radiation Oncology, MD Anderson Cancer Center, Orlando, FL, ^‡Avalere Health LLC, Washington, DC, ^§Department of Urologic Surgery, Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN, and ^¶Department of Urology, Cornell University, New York, NY, USA

OBJECTIVE

• To characterise the costs and outcomes associated with radical prostatectomy (open, laparoscopic, or robot-assisted) and radiation therapy (RT: dose-escalated three-dimensional conformal RT, intensity-modulated RT, brachytherapy, or combination), using a comprehensive, lifetime decision analytical model.

PATIENTS AND METHODS

• A Markov model was constructed to follow hypothetical men with low-, intermediate-, and high-risk prostate cancer over their lifetimes after primary treatment; probabilities of outcomes were based on an exhaustive literature search yielding 232 unique publications.

• In each Markov cycle, patients could have remission, recurrence, salvage treatment, metastasis, death from prostate cancer, and death from other causes.

• Utilities for each health state were determined, and disutilities were applied for complications and toxicities of treatment.

• Costs were determined from the USA payer perspective, with incorporation of patient costs in a sensitivity analysis.

RESULTS

• Differences across treatments in quality-adjusted life years across methods were modest, ranging from 10.3 to 11.3 for low-risk patients, 9.6–10.5 for intermediate-risk patients and 7.8–9.3 for high-risk patients.

• There were no statistically significant differences among surgical methods, which tended to be more effective than RT methods, with the exception of combined external beam + brachytherapy for high-risk disease.

• RT methods were consistently more expensive than surgical methods; costs ranged from $19 901 (robot-assisted prostatectomy for low-risk disease) to $50 276 (combined RT for high-risk disease).

• These findings were robust to an extensive set of sensitivity analyses.

CONCLUSIONS

• Our analysis found small differences in outcomes and substantial differences in payer and patient costs across treatment alternatives.

• These findings may inform future policy discussions about strategies to improve efficiency of treatment selection for localised prostate cancer.