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 burden for those children.Methods Using decision analysis model, we collected clinical utilities from literature and survey and compared chemotherapy exposure between risk-adapted treatment and surveillance.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 salvage chemotherapy.Conclusions Risk-adapted treatment might decrease chemotherapy-related toxicity for these high-risk patients and further clinical study was needed.
How safe is surveillance in patients with histologically low-risk non-seminomatous testicular cancer in a geographically extended country with limited computerised tomographic resources?
