Cancer treatment decision warning
Updated on 16 December 2007
A specialist in using ultrasound to treat prostate cancer has said a judgment by the NHS guiding body risked "putting back research by many years".
A draft guideline from the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (Nice), issued over the summer, said radical therapies such as High Intensity Focused Ultrasound (Hifu) "are not recommended for men with localised or locally advanced prostate cancer other than in the context of controlled clinical trials".
A final judgment is due in February, but Mark Emberton, a consultant urologist at University College Hospital, London, said the ruling could be used as a "rationing mechanism" to "stifle potentially useful innovation".
More than 30,000 men in the UK are diagnosed with prostate cancer every year.
Hifu is a non-invasive procedure which uses ultrasound energy to kill cancer cells in the prostate, with minimal damage to the surrounding tissue.
It was approved as safe to use in the NHS in March 2005 but, in comparison to other treatments, less is known about its long-term effects and effectiveness.
Other possible treatments include surgery and radiation therapy or, where the disease is more advanced, hormone therapy and chemotherapy.
A Nice spokeswoman said the Hifu procedure was "not cost-effective". She said: "It's not about affordability, it's about value for money. It's better to spend the money on treatments that you know are clinically effective, that are best value for money and give the best improvement in the patient."
She said Nice wanted to see further evidence of the efficacy of the treatment, and if it was judged to be "worthwhile" the final decision in February "could be different".
But Mr Emberton said: "The cost-effective argument is ludicrous, the economic argument is completely fallacious. We've turned a five-day hospital stay into a five-hour hospital stay. All you're doing is investing in a bit of software and ultrasound kit."
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