RESEARCH Open Access Dose-escalated salvage ra k

Full list of author information is available at the end of the articleBackground Radical prostatectomy (RP) is an effective and widely employed curative treatment for localized prostate can-cer. Despite that, biochemical relapse after RP will occur in 17–64 % of the patients depending upon the selection criteria used, and up to a third of these patients will clin-ically progress to develop metastatic disease and ultim-ately die of prostate cancer [1]. Serum prostate-specific antigen (PSA) level after RP is a sensitive marker for tumor persistence and precedes clinical failure by years before the location of the recur-rence becomes clinically evident [2]. Postoperative and/ or salvage radiotherapy (SRT) offer a potentially curative treatment for selected patients with biochemical or local failure after RP and could reduce the risk of initial fail-ure in high-risk patients [3,4]. The extent of postopera-tive and salvage radiotherapy and its most useful timing are frequently debated issues, with the line of separation between these two paradigms being increasingly blurred due to the advent of sensitive PSA-assays [5,6]