Essay On Prostate Cancer

Prostate cancer, the silent killer of men and the second leading cause of cancer death in men in the United States. It is estimated that close to twenty-seven thousand deaths from this disease will occur this year. It begins when cells in the prostate gland starts to grow uncontrollably. The prostate is a gland found only in males, it is found below the bladder and in front of the rectum. The size of the prostate changes with age, in younger men, it is about the size of a walnut, but it can be much larger in older men. Almost all prostate cancer are adenocarcinomas. Some prostate cancers can grow and spread quickly, but most grow slowly. In fact, autopsy studies show that older men and even some younger men who died of other causes also had prostate cancer that never affected them during their lives. In many cases neither they, nor their doctors knew they had it. Some research suggests that prostate cancer starts out as a pre-cancerous condition, although
this is not yet known for sure. These conditions are sometimes found when a man has a prostate biopsy, which deals with the removal of small pieces of the prostate to look for cancer.
In the treatment of prostate cancer, there is no one size treatment for it, there are many ways to treat it. Depending on each case, treatment for men with prostate cancer will include surgery, Radiation therapy, Cryotherapy, Hormone therapy and chemotherapy. For eighty percent of men with this type of disease, doctors can diagnose it in its early stages. However, despite having been treated for prostate cancer, about thirty to forty percent of men suffer a relapse, meaning their cancer will return. Among these men, fewer than fifty percent are cured. Men with recurrent disease account for most twenty-seven thousand prostate cancer deaths in the United States.
In 1998 a clinical trial done by the NCI, which include 760 patients, who were randomly assigned to receive bicalutamide (casodex) or a placebo for twenty-four months, along with six point five weeks of radiation therapy, showed that the combination of both improve the survival for some men with recurrent prostate cancer.
The overall survival rate among patients in the bicalutamide group at twelve year showed twenty-one of the patients receiving the treatment had died from prostate cancer, versus the forty-six patients in the placebo group. In 2010, the study showed that treatment with bicalutamide led to a reduction in both biochemical recurrence and the development of metastases Due to the slow process of prostate cancer, researchers wanted a longer-term follow-up to determine whether some participants could be considered cured of their disease. In this article it shows the importance of randomized clinical trials with very long follow-up, that lead to amazing results in the fight of recurrent prostate
cancer.