This page provides a brief overview to help you understand how the charts work.  These charts or graphs are provided for three categories of patients.  Men diagnosed with Low, Intermediate and High risk prostate cancer.  The charts available on this website provide the ability to to interact with the graph.  At the top of each graph, are functions that you can select to clear the graph and then individually select specific treatments you would like to compare.  Once you have captured the specific information of interest, there are functions to download or print the information displayed on the graph.

For many, interacting with the website may be too complicated or tedious.  As we recommend sharing this information with your Doctor, we also provide a summary of  the Study.  This Study can be printed or downloaded and taken with you to your Doctor visit and be used to facilitate the discussion of recurrence vs remission during treatment selection.

The charts for comparing prostate cancer treatments consist of two types of information.

First, the results of each of the articles that match your situation are plotted as data points on a two-dimensional grid. Each point on the grid represents the results of one of the articles. The scale on the left is the percentage of patients that were “PSA Progression-Free”, meaning they did not experience a recurrence of their cancer. The closer to the top of the chart, the better the results. The scale at the bottom is the number of years since the treatment. The farther to the right, the longer the time from treatment.

Second, the data points for each treatment method (e.g. Surgery) are encircled by a mathematically-calculated weighted standard-deviational ellipse, to help you easily visualize how an entire group of patients using that treatment method are doing. This circular shape is a way to visualize the average of all of the articles, and the direction of the treatment effectiveness over time. If you don’t see the ellipse for a particular type of treatment, it is because there have not yet been enough published articles for that treatment in this risk category to properly calculate the ellipse.

If you are curious about how the charts work, please see this technical explanation of how the standard deviational ellipse works.

The ellipse shows two important things:

If you look at the mid portion of the ellipse it will tell you, on average, how the patients receiving that treatment are doing.

The direction of the ellipse can give you an idea of how the patients receiving that treatment are doing over time. If the shape of the ellipse points downward then an increasing number of patients are failing, long after their treatment.

How the Charts Work: How to Compare Prostate Cancer Treatments

The charts are interactive; click the check boxes next to the treatments you wish to compare to show the results for that treatment. Click the check boxes again to turn off the comparison for that treatment. You can repeat this process as many times as you wish. You can further refine the results by clicking directly on any of the terms in the legend at the lower-right, to turn off or on any of the treatment classifications, or the ellipse surrounding the chart data points. You can also turn the ellipse on and off by clicking the legend item that has the Greek letter sigma (σ) at the end.

Once you have made your comparison selections, you can print the results. Just click the Print button to bring up the printer dialog for your system. You can also download a PDF file with your chosen comparison. We recommend sharing this file with your Doctor as part of the treatment selection process.