Men with recently diagnosed metastatic prostate cancer (M1) who have no more than three bone metastases or have non-regional lymph node metastasis alone can expect to live longer if they have local radiotherapy as well as standard of care systemic therapy, researchers say.

In their retrospective analysis of data from the STAMPEDE trial, UK investigators sought to identify which aspects of metastatic disease were associated with improved overall survival and ‘failure-free survival’ after radiotherapy of the prostate.

Assessing metastatic burden was controversial in this setting, they said. It had traditionally been considered ‘high’ or ‘low’ according to the prognosis for systemic therapies, but type and site of metastases might have different effects on prognosis post-radiotherapy, they said.

For their analysis they examined baseline bone scans for 1939 (94%) of the men in the M1 radiotherapy comparison of the STAMPEDE trial.