How to Reduce Prostate Cancer Recurrence

What are some of the ways that you can reduce the risk of prostate cancer recurrences? I believe that the most important way to reduce the risk of prostate cancer recurrence is to be a good candidate for definitive therapy, whether it be radiation therapy or surgical intervention. Patients that have high Gleason scores or if their tumor biology is an aggressive type tumor, one treatment option may not be a better choice, for example if you have disease that is outside the prostate, surgical intervention is probably not going to cure you. So a discussion with your physician in trying to choose and determine if you are a good surgical candidate is extremely important. Another important factor is the experience of the surgeon. There has been literature that has shown that surgeons that do high volume prostate cancer work tend to have lower recurrence rates or lower positive margin rates. As a patient, you should ask your physician what is their positive margin rate. You should also ask them what their rate of incontinence is and what their rates of erectile dysfunction are after surgery. All of these factors are important in trying to determine the best and get the best outcome from surgery if you choose surgery as an option. Recurrences can also be affected by the natural history of the disease itself. If the disease is outside the prostate, surgical intervention may not cure you and you may require radiation therapy or even hormonal therapy down the line to try to help treat your prostate cancer. Some prostate cancers are high risk, aggressive, and more likely to spread. Others are low risk, least likely to have bad outcomes. The biopsy says cancer, but current diagnostic tools provide limited information about how aggressive a man's individual disease is, so most men decide to treat prostate cancer immediately. Once treated, many men experience serious long-term side effects like incontinence and *** impotence. Immediate treatment is not always needed, but right now a man can't be sure if his cancer is the kind that is likely to require treatment or if he is okay to wait for now. What if there was a test that could determine how aggressive prostate cancer is. Genomic health is developing a new test to do just that. By reviewing the underlying biology of the tumor and using genes from multiple biologic pathways, the test can predict the aggressiveness of prostate cancer when diagnosed, allowing a man to make a more informed treatment decision with confidence, taking care of himself with more information and greater peace of mind.