ARTICLES Causes of Death in Elderly Prostate Cancer Patients and in a Comparison Nonprostate Cancer Cohort

Background: Prostate cancer tends to affect older men and to progress relatively slowly. Since the prevalence of comor-bidity increases with advancing age, competing causes of death are important contributors to death rates among pros-tate cancer patients. Accurate determination of the under-lying causes of death in older men dying with prostate cancer may thus also be more difficult. Methods: We compared the distribution of underlying causes of death in decedents from a population-based cohort of elderly prostate cancer patients to that from a population-based comparison cohort of elder-ly men without prostate cancer. Among decedents from the prostate cancer patient cohort, we examined associations of patient demographics, disease stage, and initial treatment, with assignment of a prostate cancer underlying cause of death (versus any other cause) by use of multivariable logis