Editorial Comment

Abstract

The authors have conducted an interesting study of the conditional freedom from biochemical recurrence for men treated with radical prostatectomy. 1 Ploussard G. de la Taille A. Moulin M. Allory Y. Abbou C. Salomon L. Conditional disease-free survival after radical prostatectomy: recurrence risk evolution over time. Urology. 2016; https://doi.org/10.1016/j.urology.2016.04.031 Abstract Full Text Full Text PDF Scopus (15) Google Scholar What makes this analysis particularly interesting is that it looks at the risk of biochemical failure, given a particular degree of follow-up without failure. In other words, it helps to answer the question of what the future risk is, given that a man has not had failure for a while. An analysis like this has two useful purposes. One is for patient counseling, revising a patient's prognosis as he returns for follow-up. For example, a man with 2 years of follow-up without recurrence may then ask what his prognosis is. For this purpose, it is probably more meaningful to use a nomogram that is constructed based on conditional survival. 2 Stephenson A. Scardino P.T. Eastham J.A. et al. Postoperative nomogram predicting the 10-year probability of prostate cancer recurrence after radical prostatectomy. J Clin Oncol. 2005; 23: 7005-7012 Crossref PubMed Scopus (491) Google Scholar Simply looking at each factor one at a time makes counseling difficult because it is not easy to combine each prognostic factor in your head.