Prostate cancer mortality is high in the elderly and can be reduced by selective individualized curative treatment

Dear Editor,

We read with interest, Bandini et al’s paper which, using a SEER-based cohort, reports radical prostatectomy (RP) or radiotherapy (RT) reduces prostate cancer (PCa) mortality in the elderly, and concludes curative therapy for localized prostate cancer should not be denied on the basis of chronological age alone [1]. We inform on our real-world data which supports these results [2]. The South Australian Prostate Cancer Clinical Outcomes Collaborative (SA-PCCOC) is the longest running prostate cancer registry in the Southern Hemisphere. It commenced in 1998 and is a prospective, third-party collected-, longitudinal, observational registry which follows participants until death or withdrawal. We examined men from our registry between 2005 and 2014, aged 70–89 without evidence of metastatic disease at presentation, identifying 1888 participants and dividing them into two cohorts based on age at diagnosis...