Lifestyle

One in Eight Men Get Prostate Cancer. The Treatment Just Got Shorter.

By Mike Harper · May 18, 2026

Approximately one in eight American men will be diagnosed with prostate cancer during their lifetime. For most of them, if the cancer is caught early and treated with radiation, the standard protocol has required five separate outpatient sessions of radiotherapy — spread across multiple visits, each requiring travel, preparation, and recovery time.

New research presented Saturday at the annual congress of the European Society for Radiotherapy and Oncology suggests that two sessions may work just as well.

The HERMES study — one of the first randomized controlled trials to directly compare two versus five radiotherapy sessions for prostate cancer — was presented by Dr. Sian Cooper of The Royal Marsden NHS Foundation Trust at ESTRO 2026. The trial used MRI-guided radiotherapy technology, which allows clinicians to precisely target the tumor while protecting surrounding tissue — a capability that makes delivering two larger doses safer than it would have been with earlier equipment.

The findings: two doses produced equivalent cancer control to five doses. Side effects were comparable between the groups. Approximately one in four patients in both treatment arms reported moderate urinary symptoms — more frequent urination, some urgency — but no severe urinary or bowel side effects were observed. Two years after treatment, patients in the two-dose group reported minimal changes in quality of life.

“Experts say the research brings us one step closer to safe and effective radiotherapy in only two outpatient sessions,” the ESTRO press summary stated.

The practical implication is significant. Reducing treatment from five sessions to two is not a marginal improvement in convenience. For a working adult managing a prostate cancer diagnosis — dealing with employer leave, transportation, the logistical burden of five separate hospital visits — the difference between two appointments and five is substantial. For men in rural areas where the nearest radiotherapy center requires significant travel, it is even more so. For healthcare systems managing capacity, two-session protocols could meaningfully increase the number of patients treated in a given facility.

The HERMES trial is a randomized study, which gives its findings more weight than observational research. But it is a single trial and the results will need to be replicated in larger populations and longer follow-up periods before two-session protocols become standard of care. The study’s two-year follow-up data is encouraging; prostate cancer’s long natural history means that longer-term data — five and ten years — will ultimately determine whether the two-session approach is equivalent to five sessions in controlling cancer recurrence over decades.

For men currently being treated for prostate cancer or recently diagnosed, the HERMES results are worth discussing with an oncologist. Two-session MRI-guided radiotherapy is not universally available — it requires specific equipment that not all centers have. But for centers that have it, Saturday’s data strengthens the case for offering patients a shorter treatment course without compromising the outcome.