Hospitalizations to Manage Complications of Modern Prostate Cancer Treatment in Older Men.

Objective: To assess rates of treatment-related hospitalizations following surgery and radiotherapy in the treatment of clinically localized prostate cancer, given the importance of hospitalizations in healthcare resource utilization.

Methods: We conducted a population-based retrospective cohort study of patients aged 65-79 years receiving radical prostatectomy (open or minimally invasive) or radiotherapy (brachytherapy or external beam) from 2001 to 2008 in the Surveillance, Epidemiology & End Results-Medicare linked databases. We assessed treatment-related hospitalizations. We analyzed the role of primary treatment on the number of complications per patient in each category using negative binomial regression.

Results: Among 60,476 men, 14,492 underwent primary surgery and 45,984 underwent primary radiotherapy. Over a median follow-up of 5.6 years, the surgery group had significantly lower rates of hospital admissions (8.9 vs 20.3/1000 person-years) than the radiation group. For both groups, admissions peaked within 2 years of treatment, but continued at a steady rate for 10 years. After adjustment for confounders, patients treated with radiation had higher incidence of hospital admissions (relative rate [RR] = 1.8, 95% confidence interval [CI]: 1.8-1.9, P < .0001), compared to those having surgery. Stratified analysis showed an increased rate of hospitalizations of 1 day and 2 or more days (RR 3.1, 95% CI: 2.7-3.7 and RR 1.6, 95% CI 1.4-1.8, respectively) for patients treated with radiotherapy. The use of adjuvant/salvage therapies significantly increased rates of hospitalization. The results were robust to analysis using propensity-score matching.

Conclusion: Treatment-related hospitalizations are more common following radiotherapy than surgery in the treatment of clinically localized prostate cancer. Limitations include a lack of treatment detail and residual confounding due to observational study design.