A recent study found surgery may be an effective alternative to radiation and chemotherapy for patients with early metastatic testicular cancer.
The study, published March 13 in the Journal of Clinical Oncology, followed 55 patients with testicular seminoma across 12 institutions in the U.S. and Canada. Patients all had clinically low-volume retroperitoneal lymphadenopathy with a medium follow-up of 33 months.
Surgery was associated with a high recurrence-free survival rate and few complications. Four patients experienced short-term complications and four patients experienced long-term complications. Only 12 patients experienced recurrence, with a two-year recurrence-free survival of 81 percent. Of patients with a recurrence, 10 were treated with chemotherapy and two underwent additional surgery. At the last follow-up, all patients with recurrences were disease-free.
"We found that the majority of participants in the study were cured with surgery alone, avoiding the toxicities associated with traditional therapies," lead investigator Sia Daneshmand, MD, a urologic oncologist at Keck Medicine of the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, said in a news release. "We are confident that surgery for this disease state will be included into treatment guidelines in the near future."