Aggressive Prostate Cancer Treatment May Not Be the Answer

A study announced Tuesday in the Journal of the American Medical Association suggests aggressive prostate cancer treatment may not be the answer in every case of the disease.

Prostate cancer  kills 254,000 men every year and is second to lung cancer as the most common cancer in men worldwide.

The research shows the risk of dying from prostate cancer in the 10 years after diagnosis fell by more than 60 percent in patients diagnosed between 1992 and 2002 compared with patients diagnosed in the 1970s and 1980s.

However, doctors only manage 10 percent of cases conservatively by allowing time to watch and wait for treatment until symptoms demand it.

Surgery, radiation and hormone therapy are current treatments and can cause harm, impotence and incontinence in about a third of patients. Considering this, the authors of Tuesday’s study said doctors and patients should reconsider the watch and wait option.

Another recent study, published in August, showed routine screening for prostate cancer led to more than 1 million men in the U.S. being diagnosed with tumors who might otherwise have suffered no ill effects from them.

In Tuesday’s study, Grace Lu-Yao and colleagues at the Cancer Institute of New Jersey studied 14,500 men 65 or older when they were diagnosed with early stage prostate cancer and who were cared for without surgery or radiation for 6 months after diagnosis.

After 10 years, they found 6 percent died from prostate cancer which was far fewer than in results of previous studies dating from 1949 to 1992.

Aggressive prostate cancer treatment may not be the only answer but Lu-Yao said the improvement in diagnosis and survival rates could relate to the introduction in 1986 of PSA blood testing that  can pick up the disease 6 to 13 years before it may otherwise be found.