Prostate Cancer Active Surveillance Trigger Trial (PCASTT-UK): Comparing Current Practice for Men With Prostate Cancer on Active Surveillance (AS) to an AS Protocol With Standardised Triggers for Transitioning to Curative Treatment

A large proportion of men with prostate cancer are overdiagnosed and overtreated mainly due to PSA testing. Active surveillance (AS) aims to reduce these harms by recommending curative treatment only when and if signs of tumour progression occur. There are however a number of uncertainties in AS, the most important being when to initiate treatment. Therefore, the Scandinavian Prostate Cancer Group (SPCG) are running a large multi-centre randomised control trial (RCT) to test the safety of a standardized active surveillance protocol with specific triggers for repeat biopsies and initiation of curative treatment, compared to the current practice for active surveillance. They are recruiting in multiple sites in Sweden, Denmark and Finland. The primary aim is to reduce overtreatment and subsequent side effects, without increasing the risk of disease progression or prostate cancer mortality. In the UK, there is also no set criteria for when to re-biopsy and/or initiate curative treatment for patients on AS and tends to be at the clinician's discretion. Thus, PCASTT-UK has been established to run as a parallel RCT and add to the findings from SPCG-17.