Prostate-Specific Membrane Antigen Positron Emission Tomography and the New Algorithm for Patients With Prostate Cancer Prior to Prostatectomy
Mené sur 764 patients atteints d'un cancer de la prostate (âge médian : 69 ans), cet essai multicentrique de phase III évalue, par rapport à une analyse histopathologique, la sensibilité et la spécificité d'une tomographie par émission de positrons utilisant le traceur 68Ga-PSMA-11 pour détecter des métastases ganglionnaires au niveau de la région pelvienne avant une prostatectomie radicale et un curage ganglionnaire pelvien
After several decades of development of prostate-specific membrane antigen (PSMA) as a biomarker for prostate cancer, a recent series of studies have defined its diagnostic clinical significance in patients with prostate cancer, including prior to radical prostatectomy, as in the diagnostic imaging study by Hope et al in this issue of JAMA Oncology. Importantly, these data comport with a similarly designed prospective trial evaluating PSMA positron emission tomography (PET) diagnostic performance of a similar agent (18F-DCFPyL) in cohort A of the OSPREY trial. There is a clear message from both trials: clinicians taking care of patients with high-risk prostate cancer being assessed for prostatectomy can use a positive PET scan as a true positive (0.95 [95% CI, 0.92-0.97] vs 0.98 [95% CI, 0.94-0.99] in the OSPREY trial), whereas a negative scan cannot be used to exclude disease or inform nodal dissection (both studies had a diagnostic sensitivity near 40%). One methodologic issue to mention is that clinicians were not blinded to PSMA PET results, and patients with evidence of extraprostatic disease may not have gone on to surgery. Post hoc analysis of these “negative” PET studies in both investigations also have a common message. Both demonstrate that many of the false-negative studies are found in patients who have pathologically PSMA-positive lymph nodes that are smaller than 1.0 cm or 0.5 cm, below the resolution of this technology. These truly micrometastatic lesions may have a better prognosis than those identified by imaging and lead to the hypothesis that these are likely the patients with long-term benefit from surgical resection.
JAMA Oncology , éditorial, 2020