Risk-adapted treatment reduced chemotherapy exposure for clinical stage 1 pediatric testicular cancer

Abstract

Background: Different from adult clinical stage I (CS1) testicular cancer, surveillance was recommended for CS1 pediatric testicular cancer. For high-risk children, greater than 50% of them suffered relapse and progress during surveillance and adjuvant chemotherapy was administrated. Risk-adapted treatment might reduce chemotherapy exposure for those children. Methods: The decision model was designed and calculated using TreeAge Pro 2011 software. Clinical utilities such as relapse rates of different groups during surveillance or after chemotherapy were collected from literatures. And a survey to urologist was performed to evaluate the toxicity of the first-line and second-line chemotherapy. Using decision analysis model, chemotherapy exposure between risk-adapted treatment and surveillance were compared based on this series of clinical utilities. One-way and two-way tests were administrated to check the feasibility. Results: In base case decision analysis of CS1 pediatric testicular cancer, risk-adapted treatment preferred lower exposure of chemotherapy than surveillance (average: 0.7965 cycle verse 1.3419 cycles). The sensitivity analysis demonstrated that when relapse rate after primary chemotherapy ≤0.10 and the relapse rate of high-risk group ≥0.40, risk-adapted treatment would expose lower chemotherapy, without association of the proportion of low-risk patients, the relapse rate of low-risk group, relapse rate after salvage chemotherapy and toxicity utility of second-line chemotherapy compared to first-line chemotherapy. Conclusions: Using decision analysis, risk-adapted treatment might decrease chemotherapy exposure for these high-risk patients and precious evaluation after orchiectomy was critical to this process. Further clinical study was needed to validate this statement.