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Cancer Information Tips :: Prostate Cancer Treatment Options
Prostate Cancer Treatment Options: Choosing Between the Treatment Options for Prostate Cancer
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Prostate cancer treatment options depend on the stage of a patient's prostate cancer. Treatment options also come down to a patient making the decision they feel is right for them and their lifestyle.
Watching and Waiting
Because prostate cancer usually grows slowly, many men will chose to wait and watch. In these cases, it is incredibly important to have regular check-ups with your physician to ensure that the rate of growth remains slow.
As long as the tumor is small and maintains a slow growth rate, a man's life expectancy may not be any different than if he did not have any cancer.
But if the rate of growth changes, prostate cancer treatment options like hormone therapy can be employed.
Hormone Therapy
Prostate cancer will usually respond to hormone therapy that reduces androgens, lowering the level of male hormones and shrinking the prostate cancer.
It generally takes 1-2 years of hormone therapy to get this result, and even then many tumors start to grow again. At this point, hormone therapy is meant only to control symptoms.
If the hormone therapy is no longer effective, there are no prostate cancer treatment options that can cure the cancer.
Radiation
Along with external radiation therapy, prostate cancer can also be treated with brachytherapy.
Brachytherapy is the implanting of small, radioactive capsules into the prostate gland. The radiation emitted by these capsules for three months works to kill small tumors.
Brachytherapy has had a great success rate with patients. A recent study showed that most patients who went with this prostate cancer treatment option remained cancer free for five years afterwards.
Surgery
For patients whose cancer is confined to the prostate, especially elderly patients, cryosurgery is an outpatient procedure which might be the best of their prostate cancer treatment options.
These procedure quickly freezes and thaws cancerous tissue two times, destroying the cancer.
More drastic is a radical prostatectomy, which removes the prostate gland along with the seminal vesicles and the pelvic lymph nodes, where prostate cancer generally first spreads.
Prostate cancer that has not spread outside the prostate is generally curable. While it is impossible to prevent prostate cancer, early detection can be the difference between a quick recovery or invasive surgery.
To ensure early detection of prostate cancer, all men over forty years of age should have an annual prostate exam.
If you suffer from this disease, you should always discuss your prostate cancer treatment options with your personal physician and an oncologist.
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CancerInfoTips.com :: Prostate Cancer Treatment Options