PSMA PET/CT in the Brazilian Unified Healthcare System reduces costs with futile salvage therapies in the management of cases of biochemical recurrence of prostate cancer.

For patients treated within the Brazilian Unified Health Care System, PSMA PET/CT presented higher costs in comparison with conventional imaging methods. Adding PSMA PET/CT to the workflow had an impact on therapeutic management, mainly representing a shift from futile curative treatments to systemic palliative ones. The amount of funds that could potentially be saved by not providing such futile treatments would suffice to evaluate roughly two patients with PSMA PET/CT scans for each futile treatment strategy avoided.