A sizeable percentage of men suffer from prostate cancer, and still there’s basically no support initiatives compared to something like breast cancer. This is an initiative to propagate awareness. Please support this and spread awareness of the lethal disease.
From Visually.
A sizeable percentage of men suffer from prostate cancer, and still there’s basically no support initiatives compared to something like breast cancer. This is an initiative to propagate awareness. Please support this and spread awareness of the lethal disease.
From Visually.
Prostate cancer
Prostate cancer is the most common cancer in men in the UK, with over 40,000 new cases diagnosed every year.
Prostate cancer usually develops slowly, so there may be no signs you have it for many years.
Symptoms often only become apparent when your prostate is large enough to affect the urethra (the tube that carries urine from the bladder to the penis).
When this happens, you may notice things like an increased need to urinate, straining while urinating and a feeling that your bladder has not fully emptied.
From Visually.
These symptoms shouldn’t be ignored, but they do not mean you definitely have prostate cancer. It is more likely that they are caused by something else, such as benign prostatic hyperplasia (also known as BPH or prostate enlargement).
Read more about the symptoms of prostate cancer.
The prostate is a small gland in the pelvis found only in men. About the size of a satsuma, it’s located between the penis and the bladder and surrounds the urethra.
The main function of the prostate is to help in the production of semen. It produces a thick white fluid that is mixed with the sperm produced by the testicles, to create semen.
The causes of prostate cancer are largely unknown. However, certain things can increase your risk of developing the condition.
The chances of developing prostate cancer increase as you get older. Most cases develop in men aged 50 or older.
For reasons not yet understood, prostate cancer is more common in men of African-Caribbean or African descent, and less common in men of Asian descent.
Men who have first degree male relatives (such as a father or brother) affected by prostate cancer are also at slightly increased risk.
Read more about the causes of prostate cancer.
There is no single test for prostate cancer. All the tests used to help diagnose the condition have benefits and risks, which your doctor should discuss with you.
The most commonly used tests for prostate cancer are blood tests, a physical examination of your prostate (known as a digital rectal examination or DRE) and a biopsy.
The blood test, known as a prostate-specific antigen (PSA) test, measures the level of PSA and may help detect early prostate cancer. Men are not routinely offered PSA tests to screen for prostate cancer, as results can be unreliable.
This is because the PSA blood test is not specific to prostate cancer. PSA can be raised due to a large non-cancerous growth of the prostate (BPH), a urinary tract infection or inflammation of the prostate, as well as prostate cancer. Raised PSA levels also cannot tell a doctor whether a man has life-threatening prostate cancer or not. This means a raised PSA can lead to unnecessary tests and treatment.
However, you can ask to be tested for prostate cancer once the benefits and risks have been explained to you.
Read more about diagnosing prostate cancer and PSA screening for prostate cancer.
For many men with prostate cancer, treatment is not immediately necessary.
If the cancer is at an early stage and not causing symptoms, a policy of “watchful waiting” or “active surveillance” may be adopted. This involves carefully monitoring your condition.
Some cases of prostate cancer can be cured if treated in the early stages. Treatments include surgically removing the prostate, radiotherapy and hormone therapy.
Some cases are only diagnosed at a later stage when the cancer has spread. If the cancer spreads to other parts of the body, typically the bones, it cannot be cured and treatment is focused on prolonging life and relieving symptoms.
All treatment options carry the risk of significant side effects, including erectile dysfunction and urinary incontinence. For this reason, many men choose to delay treatment until there is a risk the cancer might spread.
Newer treatments, such as high-intensity focused ultrasound (HIFU) or cryotherapy, aim to reduce these side effects. Some hospitals may offer them as an alternative to surgery, radiotherapy or hormone therapy. However, the long-term effectiveness of these treatments are not yet known.
Read more about treating prostate cancer.
As prostate cancer usually progresses very slowly, you can live for decades without symptoms or needing treatment.
Nevertheless, it can have an effect on your life. As well as causing physical problems such as erectile dysfunction and urinary incontinence, a diagnosis of prostate cancer can understandably make you feel anxious or depressed.
You may find it beneficial to talk about the condition with your family, friends, a family doctor and other men with prostate cancer.
Financial support is also available if prostate cancer reduces your ability to work.
Read more about living with prostate cancer.
Prostate cancer
“Targeted radiotherapy ‘cures’ prostate cancer that kills thousands,” reports The Times.
The news is based on a UK study of the use of high-precision radiotherapy to treat men with advanced localised prostate cancer.
Researchers wanted to see if they could safely target cancer cells that had spread outside the prostate to nearby lymph nodes without damaging nearby healthy cells, and reduce treatment side effects.
Prostate cancer is the most common cancer in men – more than 47,000 cases are diagnosed in the UK every year.
Some 447 men with locally advanced disease took part in the 10-year study, carried out by the Institute of Cancer Research and the Royal Marsden NHS Foundation Trust.
The high-tech radiotherapy, called pelvic lymph node intensity modulated radiation therapy (PLN-IMRT), can modify the shape and strength of its beams to target cancerous cells more effectively.
The main aim of the study was to look at the side effects of the treatment, specifically on the bladder and bowels.
Five years after receiving treatment, up to 71% of patients were alive and disease-free. Only 8-16% of patients experienced bowel or bladder complications.
This is promising research that suggests PLN-IMRT should be studied further. Later-stage randomised controlled trials would be the best way of confirming the safety and potential benefit of this treatment for men with advanced localised prostate cancer and seeing how it compares with other treatment approaches.
The study was carried out by researchers from the Institute of Cancer Research and the Royal Marsden NHS Foundation Trust, both in London. It was funded by Cancer Research UK, the Department of Health, the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) Cancer Research Network and the NHS.
It was published in the peer-reviewed International Journal of Radiation Oncology Biology Physics and is free to read online.
The media headlines talking of a “cure” are premature at this point. This early-stage study focused on the potential harms of PLN-IMRT.
While the number of men surviving without disease progression was an exciting finding that should prompt further research, it’s important to realise that the present study wasn’t designed to give us definitive answers on whether the treatment works or how it should be delivered.
This was a phase I and phase II trial designed to see whether PLN-IMRT was a feasible treatment to use in men with advanced localised prostate cancer and to look at its side effects.
Locally advanced prostate cancer means the cancer has spread outside of the prostate to the nearby lymph nodes and tissues, such as the semen-carrying seminal vesicles.
There are a number of treatment options, one of which is radiotherapy – but this is often targeted at the prostate and seminal vesicles rather than directly at the lymph nodes.
This is an early-stage trial, so the participants were not randomised to the treatment they received and there was no comparison group receiving a different treatment.
This stage of trial is important for looking at side effects and seeing if the treatment approach is feasible, but it can’t provide good evidence for how effective the treatment is – that requires later-stage trials.
The researchers recruited 447 men with advanced localised prostate cancer. The men received radiotherapy to the prostate as well as to the prostate lymph nodes in one of five different dosage patterns.
The dosage pattern each person received was determined by the order in which they entered the study, rather than being allocated at random.
The dosages were:
group 1: 70-74 gray units of radiation (Gy) to the prostate and 50Gy to the prostate lymph nodes over 35-37 sessions
group 2: as group 1 but with 55Gy to the prostate lymph nodes
group 3: as group 1 but with 60Gy to the prostate lymph nodes
group 4: 60Gy to the prostate and 47Gy to the prostate lymph nodes, spread across 20 sessions over the course of four weeks
group 5: as group 4 but across 20 sessions over five weeks
Everyone in the study also received long-course androgen-deprivation therapy (the male hormone, androgen, helps the cancer to grow).
Men were not allowed to participate in the study if they were unsuitable for radical radiation therapy, or had a history of either pelvic surgery or inflammatory bowel disease.
The main aim was to look at side effects of the treatment, particularly toxic effects on the bladder and bowel within two years of treatment.
The researchers also got an indication of how effective the treatment was by measuring survival rates as the study progressed and how many men could be considered to be free of prostate cancer.
However, it should be noted that, as this wasn’t a randomised trial, the men in each treatment group were not necessarily directly comparable in terms of their risk factors at the start of the study.
The researchers found that acute bowel toxicity peaked between six and eight weeks after treatment in groups 1, 2 and 3, but it occurred earlier in group 4 (in weeks four to five) and group 5 (weeks five to six). Most cases of bladder toxicity occurred in the first few weeks following treatment.
Rates of both bowel and bladder toxicity stabilised over time and were similar in all groups 18 weeks after treatment.
The overall toxicity rates per group at two years after treatment were as follows:
group 1: bowel 8.3%, bladder 4.2%
group 2: bowel 8.9%, bladder 5.9%
group 3: bowel 13.2%, bladder 2.9%
group 4: bowel 16.4%, bladder 4.8%
group 5: bowel 12.2%, bladder 7.3%
Disease progression occurred in 169 of 426 men (40%). The disease-free survival and overall survival rates were:
group 1 (26 people allocated): 38% disease-free, 76% survival
group 2 (59): 61% disease-free, 88% survival
group 3 (157): 70% disease-free, 92% survival
group 4 (70): 80% disease-free, 97% survival
group 5 (135): 78% disease-free, 95% survival
The researchers described the bladder- and bowel-related toxicity rates of the treatment to be “acceptable” both in the short and longer term. They described the long-term disease-free survival of some people in the study as being consistent with other research on the same type of treatment.
This study shows some promising results for targeted pelvic lymph node radiotherapy for men with advanced localised prostate cancer.
However, these results can only be treated as preliminary findings for now. This was an early-stage trial that aimed to investigate whether the treatment approach is safe and to get an idea of what doses may be suitable for assessment in further trials. Although it can give an indication of effectiveness, this was not the main aim of the study.
Men were not randomised to a treatment group, which means there may have been some differences in the cancers or patient characteristics of men who received the different radiation dosages. This could, in turn, have impacted how effective the treatment was and makes it hard to know at this stage what the optimal approach to delivering this treatment would be – which dose is the best, for example.
All men in the study also received some kind of pelvic lymph node radiotherapy, which means it’s not possible to say how effective PLN-IMRT is compared with more conventional treatment approaches.
This research gives us a potential new treatment to investigate for men with locally advanced prostate cancer. Further trials looking more precisely at the effectiveness of this treatment are already in progress.
However, it will be some time before it’s known whether this could become a standard treatment option in the future.