Abstract
Quantitative evaluation of the primary prostate cancer lesion and distant metastatic lesions is difficult and, as of now, there are no generally established criteria to evaluate therapy effectiveness for this disease. In our department we established criteria for the evaluation of therapeutic effectiveness, based in part on the General Rules for Clinical and Pathological Studies on Prostate Cancer, and analyzed the value of the criteria in relation to the clinical stages of the cases treated in our department. According to the stage classification criteria in the General Rules, in stages A and B, improvement was recognized in 6 cases, no change in 10 and progress of the disease was recognized in 2. In stage C there were 3 cases of improvement, 10 of no change and 1 of progress of the disease. In stage D, all cases were unchanged. However, according to our criteria for evaluating therapy effectiveness, in stages A and B there was improvement in 9 cases, 5 with no change and 4 showed progress of the disease. In stage C there were 4 cases each of improvement and no change, and 6 cases showing progress of the disease, whereas in stage D there were 9 cases of improvement, 2 of no change and 1 of progression of the disease. When evaluated according to the above-mentioned General Rules, many cases were placed in the unchanged category. The reason for this is that the clinical criteria for evaluation by the General Rules are not sensitive enough to reflect changes in the primary tumor, and we considered that our Therapy Evaluation Criteria (TEC) compensated for this. It is therefore felt that our TEC system is clinically useful.
