Reston, VA (August 13, 2025) A new study from Denmark shows
for the first time that men with biochemically recurrent prostate cancer who
undergo PSMA PET/CT before salvage radiotherapy have improved survival rates
compared to those who do not. Using data collected nationwide over a period of
eight years, researchers confirmed that PSMA PET/CT is a valuable tool for
identifying patients who are likely to benefit from salvage radiotherapy. This research
was published in the August issue of The Journal of Nuclear Medicine.
Biochemical recurrence after radical prostatectomy occurs in
up to 40 percent of prostate cancer patients and salvage radiotherapy is
recommended as the main curative option. With salvage radiotherapy, physicians
rely on imaging to precisely locate recurrences for targeted treatment. While this
imaging was previously performed with bone scintigraphy, CT, or MRI, the
excellent diagnostic capability of PSMA PET/CT makes it the current modality of
choice.
It is widely accepted that PSMA PET/CT is more accurate
than other imaging methods for returning prostate cancer, and that it often
changes patient treatment strategies, said Anna W. Mogensen, MSc,
a PhD student at the Department of Nuclear Medicine at Aalborg University
Hospital in Aalborg, Denmark. Nevertheless, it has remained unclear whether
PSMA PET/CT guided changes in treatment strategy led to improved survival.
She continued, PSMA PET/CT was introduced in Denmark in 2015; however not all
regions adopted the imaging modality at once. Utilizing Denmark s nationwide
health registry, my colleagues and I compiled a large and comprehensive dataset
to compare the overall survival between patients who underwent PSMA PET/CT before
salvage radiotherapy and those who did not.
The study used data obtained from routine clinical practice
of all patients treated with salvage radiotherapy in Denmark from 2015 through
2023. In total, 844 patients were categorized according to whether they
underwent pretreatment PSMA PET/CT (308 patients) or did not (536 patients). Researchers
compared the overall survival, as well as biochemical recurrence-free survival,
for up to five years after completion of salvage radiotherapy.
The analysis revealed greater overall survival for patients
who underwent PSMA PET/CT before salvage radiotherapy than for patients who did
not. The one-, two-, and five-year survival rates for PSMA PET/CT patients were
100, 99.5, and 98.1 percent, respectively, versus 99, 97.8, and 93.8 percent,
respectively, for non-PSMA PET/CT patients. The three-year biochemical
recurrence-free survival rate was consistent with overall survival: 74.9
percent for PSMA PET/CT patients and 69.4 percent for non-PSMA PET/CT patients.
Our findings show that PSMA PET/CT scans can help
clinicians select the patients most likely to experience success with salvage
radiotherapy. This means fewer patients may receive unnecessary treatment,
while more will be provided with the appropriate care, Mogensen said. These
findings support broader use of nuclear medicine techniques to guide therapy
and suggest that integrating imaging early in treatment decisions could become
a new standard in cancer care.