Background: Different from adult clinical stage I (CS1) testicular cancer, surveillance has been recommended for CS1 pediatric testicular cancer. However, among high-risk children, more than 50% suffer a relapse and progression during surveillance, and adjuvant chemotherapy needs to be administered. Risk-adapted treatment might reduce chemotherapy exposure among these children.
Methods: A decision model was designed and calculated using TreeAge Pro 2011 software. Clinical utilities such as the relapse rates of different groups during surveillance or after chemotherapy were collected from the literature. A survey of urologists was conducted to evaluate the toxicity of first-line and second-line chemotherapy. Using the decision analysis model, chemotherapy exposure of the risk-adapted treatment and surveillance strategies were compared based on this series of clinical utilities. One-way and two-way tests were applied to check the feasibility.
Results: In the base case decision analysis of CS1 pediatric testicular cancer, risk-adapted treatment resulted in a lower exposure to chemotherapy than surveillance (average: 0.7965 cycles verse 1.3419 cycles). The sensitivity analysis demonstrated that when the relapse rate after primary chemotherapy was ≤ 0.10 and the relapse rate of the high-risk group was ≥ 0.40, risk-adapted treatment would result in a lower exposure to chemotherapy, without any association with the proportion of low-risk patients, the relapse rate of the low-risk group, the relapse rate after salvage chemotherapy or the toxicity utility of second-line chemotherapy compared to first-line chemotherapy.
Conclusions: Based on the decision analysis, risk-adapted treatment might decrease chemotherapy exposure for these high-risk patients, and an evaluation after orchiectomy was critical to this process. Additional clinical studies are needed to validate this statement.