Prostate Cancer
Doctors also examine the ploidy, or number of sets of chromosomes in a cancer cell. Diploid cells, for example, have a complete set of normally paired chromosomes and tend to grow slowly and respond well to therapy.
Recently, some doctors have begun using Partin Tables, a scoring method developed at Johns Hopkins University that uses PSA, Gleason number, and staging to predict if the disease is confined or has spread to other sites. Doctors also can determine cancer spread with imaging techniques such as bone scans and computerized tomography (CT) scans.
Armed with diagnostic data, patients and their doctors must then decide on a treatment course. It is at this point that patients must be well educated, says FDA's Fourcroy. "The decisions made (on treatment) are so crucial and will have such an effect on quality of life, men must weigh them very carefully," she says. "And they must also remember to include their partners in the decisions because they will be affected by the course of action too."
One possible treatment is actually no treatment at all. Doctors call it watchful waiting, and it is best suited for men with a 10-year life expectancy or less who have a low Gleason number and whose tumor has not spread beyond the prostate. The idea is that in these men the cancer is growing so slowly, they likely won't die from it. More radical treatments such as surgery might be more dangerous than simply waiting. Marty Feins, 77, opted for watchful waiting nearly five years ago when diagnosed with prostate cancer, and he's "going great," he says. Though the Las Vegas man was deemed a good candidate for radiation treatment, he says he did a lot of research and decided his was a prudent course. His PSA level is elevated but is not rising rapidly. "Right now I'm holding steady," he says. "In fact, if I hadn't had a biopsy, I wouldn't even know I have (cancer)."
Californian Jerry Coleman, 61, diagnosed three years ago, opted for a surgical treatment called radical prostatectomy (RP), in which the prostate is completely removed. If performed when cancer is confined to the gland, RP is tantamount to a cure since in theory it removes all the cancer. Coleman says he chose RP because he was unsure of the track record of other treatments. "I felt comfortable that this was the appropriate attack considering my health, age, and the stage of my disease," he says.
In this article
- Detecting Prostate Cancer
- Stages of Prostate Cancer
- Treating the Disease
- Looking Ahead
- Out in the Open
- For More Information
Stages of Prostate Cancer continued...
Doctors also examine the ploidy, or number of sets of chromosomes in a cancer cell. Diploid cells, for example, have a complete set of normally paired chromosomes and tend to grow slowly and respond well to therapy.
Recently, some doctors have begun using Partin Tables, a scoring method developed at Johns Hopkins University that uses PSA, Gleason number, and staging to predict if the disease is confined or has spread to other sites. Doctors also can determine cancer spread with imaging techniques such as bone scans and computerized tomography (CT) scans.
Treating the Disease
Armed with diagnostic data, patients and their doctors must then decide on a treatment course. It is at this point that patients must be well educated, says FDA's Fourcroy. "The decisions made (on treatment) are so crucial and will have such an effect on quality of life, men must weigh them very carefully," she says. "And they must also remember to include their partners in the decisions because they will be affected by the course of action too."
One possible treatment is actually no treatment at all. Doctors call it watchful waiting, and it is best suited for men with a 10-year life expectancy or less who have a low Gleason number and whose tumor has not spread beyond the prostate. The idea is that in these men the cancer is growing so slowly, they likely won't die from it. More radical treatments such as surgery might be more dangerous than simply waiting. Marty Feins, 77, opted for watchful waiting nearly five years ago when diagnosed with prostate cancer, and he's "going great," he says. Though the Las Vegas man was deemed a good candidate for radiation treatment, he says he did a lot of research and decided his was a prudent course. His PSA level is elevated but is not rising rapidly. "Right now I'm holding steady," he says. "In fact, if I hadn't had a biopsy, I wouldn't even know I have (cancer)."
Californian Jerry Coleman, 61, diagnosed three years ago, opted for a surgical treatment called radical prostatectomy (RP), in which the prostate is completely removed. If performed when cancer is confined to the gland, RP is tantamount to a cure since in theory it removes all the cancer. Coleman says he chose RP because he was unsure of the track record of other treatments. "I felt comfortable that this was the appropriate attack considering my health, age, and the stage of my disease," he says.