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Background and Purpose: Health-related quality of life (QoL) concerns are important for patients selecting treatment options for clinically localized prostate cancer and are critical in evaluating outcomes. We report pretreatment and post-treatment general and disease-specific QoL for the following invasive interventions: open radical prostatectomy (ORP), laparoscopic radical prostatectomy (LRP), and palladium-103 (¹⁰³Pd) brachytherapy.

Patients and Methods: We performed a prospective longitudinal survey of 452 patients with newly diagnosed prostate cancer treated at a single medical center between 2001 and 2003. An Institutional Review Board-approved questionnaire comprised of validated QoL instruments was sent to patients scheduled to undergo ORP (N = 186), LRP (N = 116), or brachytherapy (N = 150). The same questionnaire was sent out 1, 3, 6, 9, and 12 months after therapy. Comparisons were made between the groups to determine if the choice of therapy resulted in differences in QoL.

Results: General QoL scores were minimally affected by the choices; however, the disease-specific domains of bowel, urinary, and sexual function were adversely affected by all modalities. The ORP and LRP groups were similar among disease-specific domains and received lower post-treatment urinary and sexual scores than the ¹⁰³Pd patients. At 12 months, 38% of ORP and 46% of LRP patients had returned to baseline urinary function compared with 75% of ¹⁰³Pd patients. At 12 months, 63% of ¹⁰³Pd patients had returned to baseline sexual function compared with 19% of both the LRP and ORP patients.

Conclusions: Invasive treatments for localized prostate cancer have little impact on general QoL but significantly affect disease-specific domains. Both ORP and LRP have a greater initial negative impact on urinary and sexual function than ¹⁰³Pd. The differences among the treatments with regard to QoL provide information to patients faced with choosing a treatment.