Radiotherapy completed, what's next

Providing he was diagnosed with a raised PSA, using PSA is more effective than scans for monitoring progress. Scans are sometimes used for patients with prostate cancer that didn't raise PSA.

The protocol varies from one hospital and oncologist to another. Typically after that sort of radiotherapy, you have a 6 week and a 12 week followup, possibly both by phone. They will usually ask for a PSA test before the 12 week one. However, both of these are really about finding out if you need any support for side effects - they won't be able to tell you much about how well the treatment went yet. PSA tests in the first 2 years will be somewhere between every 3-6 months, and will probably continue after that every 6 months while he's still on hormone therapy. When the hormone therapy finishes, it's good if they add Testosterone level to the test, so they can see when it recovers, because without knowing that, it's not easy to make sense of the PSA readings. A year or so after finishing the hormone therapy, when Testosterone has recovered to a stable level, PSA will rise in response to that, and it's then important to see what level PSA settles. That's the first indication of how well the radiotherapy worked.

He'll probably continue to have PSA tests 6-monthly up to 5 years post treatment, and if it's all looking good at that point, they will probably switch to annually. This all varies by area though, and different hospitals have different agreements with GPs when they take over the PSA monitoring.

To add to Andy62's explanation, I've been on 3-monthly follow-ups with my oncologist for the past 5 years.

He feels it's a good interval to allow patients to report any changes in how they feel and any new side-effects from ongoing hormone therapy, and also to keep a close eye on PSA levels.