Nomograms to Assess Treatment Options


Email Raji.Kooner@svha.org.au or call 02 8382 6980 for a confidential appointment.

Well nomograms are very useful, they help guide us and patients through prostate cancer assessment.

So for example we will be able to put into a nomogram, usually for the Memorial Sloan Kettering website1, the PSA, the number of biopsies that are positive, the clinical stage and they will be able to tell us the chance of cure with surgery, radiotherapy or seed therapy and also they will be able to give us an indication of the likely chance of survival if we do nothing but observe the cancer. 

These nomograms are also useful post surgical treatment to tell us outcomes2, also for post radiotherapy. 

So they are quite useful for patients. 

There are some limitations on the nomograms though because sometimes you can punch in the numbers and one can clearly think that surgery might be better than radiotherapy but realistically there’s no clinical trial to definitely say that. 

So they’re useful but not, they’re not the be end and end all of everything and some patients find them very useful to help make some decisions on treatment options.

References

1. Prostate Cancer Nomograms - Memorial Sloan Kettering - https://www.mskcc.org/nomograms/prostate
2. Nomograms to predict outcomes after 177Lu-PSMA therapy in men with metastatic castration-resistant prostate cancer: an international, multicentre, retrospective study - Andrei Gafita, Jeremie Calais, Tristan R Grogan et al - https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34246328/