The role of elective pelvic radiotherapy in clinically node-negative prostate cancer: a systematic review.

The role of elective radiotherapy of the pelvic nodal regions in clinically node-negative prostate cancer patients remains highly controversial. This review will address the difficulty of non-invasive nodal staging, even with more advanced imaging techniques, and will show that surgical staging still finds a relatively high percentage of patients with intermediate- or high-risk prostate cancer that have microscopic tumor invasion in the pelvic nodes. Finally, an overview of the current literature on elective pelvic irradiation will be provided.