Prostate cancer is a major cause of death and suffering in men.  Last year 241,000 American men were diagnosed with prostate cancer. Twenty eight thousand men passed away from prostate cancer in 2011. It is important to understand that the severity of the disease can be very different in different men.  In some it is life threatening, whilst in others, the cancer can be safely monitored without active treatment.  There are well described factors that predict the aggressiveness of a particular patients cancer.  We will discuss these factors in detail on this website.

In the last twenty years there has been a significant change in how we are discovering that a particular patient has prostate cancer. Previously, most men diagnosed with prostate cancer had a large volume of disease and had a higher likelihood of having stage III or IV disease.  In the early 1990s a test called serum PSA (Prostate Specific Antigen) became widely available in the clinic.  PSA is a protein found on the surface of cells that make up the glands of the prostate. With widespread screening with serum PSA, the vast majority of men now have a highly curable Stage I or II disease at the time of diagnosis.

The treatments for Prostate Cancer are dramatically different and for many men no treatment is necessary at all.  In this website we will explore how to decide when treatment is necessary and which one may be best for you.  Standard treatment include the Radical Prostatectomy, External Beam Radiotherapy and Brachytherapy (Radioactive seed implants).  Each one of these major treatment approaches has multiple variations.  The advantages and disadvantages will also be fully explored.

Due to the fact that many men are needlessly treated, the PSA test has become controversial.  We will explore when PSA testing is appropriate, when one should act on a high PSA with a biopsy of the gland and how to set up a monitoring program when active treatment is not needed.