Prostate Cancer Diagnosis – What Next?

The news is good about prostate cancer. Although it is the third most often diagnosed cancer in men in the United States, following skin and lung cancers, 98 percent of sufferers are still alive five years after diagnosis. This is a vast improvement over the 64 percent rate of the late 1980s. Although the rate drops to 91 percent ten years after diagnosis this is still an impressive survival rate considering that the group includes men who were first diagnosed with advanced cancer and many older men of whom an appreciable number have other health issues.
The news can be very good indeed; for example, 99 percent of men with Gleason 6 organ confined prostate cancer have not had any relapse (biochemical failure) a decade after surgical treatment. Further, it is very unlikely that these men will experience a recurrence after that time.

Despite the highly encouraging statistics many men and their families are initially devastated by the diagnosis. Although every man and every family member has a very individual reaction there are some common elements that many men share.

There are a number of treatment modalities for this disease. None is better than surgery when it comes to cancer control. For this reason surgery is frequently referred to as the “gold standard” against which other treatments are compared.

Modern therapies are achieving impressive results. In this age of PSA testing men tend to be diagnosed at an early stage, frequently before their cancer has spread from their prostate or the immediate area. At this stage, treatment is usually quite effective and very frequently completely curative. Sexual side effects of treatment, where they occur, may be mitigated by oral medications, injection therapy or even penile implants. And incontinence (beyond the recovery period), once the bane of prostate treatments, is now the exception rather than the rule.
There are several proven treatments for prostate cancer and a number of others whose value has not been as well proven. The treatments that most men resort to today are radiation therapies (of whom several types exist) and surgery (with the da Vinci robotic prostatectomy method being the most prevalent today).

Concern about recovery – prostate treatment may result in serious effects on the body. The recovery process varies by type of treatment, the physician who performs it and of course by the man’s individual physiological resiliency. Some types of treatments are relatively noninvasive, but may exhibit lingering or even increasing side effects as time passes while others have a greater initial effect on function which can markedly improve over time.

Privacy issues – some men are very open with family, friends and coworkers about their diagnosis while others react with varying degrees of isolation.

Make a treatment decision that you are comfortable with – By the time most men finish doing their “homework” a treatment decision (or even the decision to defer treatment) will have assumed a certain shape in their mind. It will be the result of time spent speaking with their support crew of family and friends, hearing or reading about prostate cancer survivors’ experiences, reading the information available in print and on the internet, speaking to physicians about the best course of action to take and doing a fair amount of thinking. By the time most men move forward with their decision much of their initial fear and uncertainty has vanished and the road ahead assumed at least some sort of reassuring outline Over a longer span of time subsequent to treatment most men express a fairly high degree of satisfaction with the treatment decisions they made.

Learn more about prostate cancer. Contact Dr. Ash Tewari.