Study of Sonablate High Intensity Focused Ultrasound shows equivalence to surgery in prostate cancer.- SonaCare Medical.

SonaCare Medical reports 5-year outcomes from a multicenter study following focal therapy treatment with its Sonablate High Intensity Focused Ultrasound of 625 medium to high-risk clinically significant nonmetastatic prostate cancer patients. With a median five-year follow-up, failure free survival at one, three, and five years was 99%, 92%, and 88% respectively, equivalent to that achieved with surgery. Metastasis-free, cancer-specific, and overall survival at five years was 98%, 100%, and 99% respectively.

The study additionally reports that 98% of men maintained pad-free urinary continence after their procedure and 85% maintained erectile function, both material improvements over that seen with surgery and radiation therapy. The study concluded that failure free survival with HIFU can be equivalent to that of surgery but with a side effect profile far more beneficial to the patient's quality of life post-procedure.

A recent report from the U.K. on 1,000 patients who underwent a radical prostatectomy found maintenance of pad-free continence at only 65%. This suggests that focal HIFU therapy can result in a 97% reduction in the number of men who require pads post-procedure when compared to surgery; ancillary data suggests a similar magnitude reduction in erectile dysfunction with focal HIFU compared to surgery.