March 2022

Encouraging results of long-term cancer control data from the longest study of focal HIFU treatment was recently publishes in European Urology. This study analyzed 1’379 patients with ≥6 months of follow-up prospectively recorded in the HIFU Evaluation and Assessment of Treatment (HEAT) registry from 13 UK centers, which is the largest reported cohort of focal HIFU.

A total of 1379 patients were evaluated with the median age being 66 years old and prostate-specific antigen was 6.9. Of the patients enrolled, 65% were classified with intermediate-risk prostate cancer and 28% were high-risk. The overall median follow-up was 32 months and for those with ≥5 years of follow-up, it was 82 months.

Key findings from the study include:

• Metastasis-free survival and prostate cancer-specific mortality at 7 years were 100%.
• 7-year Failure-free survival (FFS) in intermediate- and high-risk cancers was 68% and 65%. FFS at 7 years for patients with at least 5-yr follow-up was 74% (69–80%), with no statistically significant difference demonstrated between intermediate- and high-risk disease.
• Adverse events occurred in 0.5% patients.

The study limitation included a lack of follow-up data at 10-years.

“We can be confident that HIFU is an effective treatment for prostate cancer that should be offered routinely to men with clinically significant prostate cancer” convinced  Professor Hashim Ahmed, senior author of the study and urologist from the Department of Surgery and Cancer at Imperial College of London, UK.

Read more in European Urology:

Deepika Reddy, Max Peters, Taimur T. Shah, Marieke van Son, Marianan Bertoncelli Tanaka, Philipp M. Huber, Derek Lomas, Aranas Rakauskas, Saiful Miah, David Eldred-Evans, Spephanie Guillaumier, Feargus Hosking-Jevis, Ryan Engle, Tim Dudderidge, Richard G. Hindler, Amr Emara, Raj Nigam, Neil McCartan, Massimo Valerio, Naveed Afzal, Henry Lewi, Clement Orczyk, Chris Ogden, Iqbal Shergill, Raj Persad, Jaspal Virdi, Caroline M. Moore, Manit Arya, Mathias Winkel, Mark Emberton, Hashim U. Ahmed. Cancer Control Outcomes Following Focal Therapy Using High-intensity Focused Ultrasound in 1379 Men with Nonmetastatic Prostate Cancer: A Multi-institute 15-year Experience. Eur Urol. 2022 Feb 2;S0302-2838(22)00006-9. doi: 10.1016/j.eururo.2022.01.005
https://www.europeanurology.com/article/S0302-2838(22)00006-9/fulltext