Dr. Samuel Washington III on setting patient expectations after prostate cancer treatment

In this video, Samuel L. Washington III, MD, MAS, shares the take-home message for the recent Cancer Medicine study “Ten-year work burden after prostate cancer treatment.” Washington is an assistant professor of urology and holds the Goldberg-Benioff Endowed Professorship in Cancer Biology at the University of California, San Francisco.

Transcription:

What is the take-home message for the practicing urologist?

I think the key here is that we emphasize that surveillance treatment continues after the diagnosis, after they get the radiation or the surgery. There's continued follow-up that needs to happen. Discussing that upfront the same way we talk about the risks and benefits of treatment, and complications and need for secondary treatment, we have to talk about what monitoring looks like after the treatment has been finished. So hopefully this gives patients and providers information that they can use to inform and set reasonable expectations of what patient's lives will look like after treatment.

Is there anything you would like to add?

I think this was very exciting in that we were able to really get self-reported data from patients multiple times throughout different years. So we were asking them the same questions at year 1, 3, 5, and 10 after diagnosis. So that structure of our database, the sheer number of patients, almost 6700 patients, allowed us to really look at this within the same patient - what's that burden looking like over time? - and I think that's a benefit to the structure of this database that we're using, that hasn't really even been explored using this actual database yet. So a new way to look at this data, and very much highlighting how you can inform care further, when you're repeatedly measuring the same patient over time consistently.

This transcript was edited for clarity.