Prostate Cancer Treatments: Options & Prognosis

There are numerous prostate cancer treatments, including hormone therapy, surgery and radiation. The appropriate prostate cancer treatment depends on your age, general health, the aggressiveness of your cancer and how far your cancer has spread.

New Surgical Options

• A prostatectomy---removal of the entire prostate---usually has the best long-term prognosis for prostate cancer survival because it removes the host organ along with the cancer, minimizing the possibility of recurrence. A revolutionary surgey, called nerve-sparing radical prostatectomy, has reduced the amount of nerve damage associated with a traditional radical prostatectomy, preserving the nerves that send sexual response signals from the penis to the brain. This new procedure can reduce the possibility of impotence after a prostate removal surgery.

New Radiation Options

• Radiation is also an effective method of treating prostate cancer. New forms of radiation allow it to be targeted on cancer cells while protecting the organs around the prostate gland, reducing side effects. Conformal external beam radiation therapy uses three-dimensional images of the body to make radiation more specific to each patient's body structure.

  Image-guided radiation therapy involves placing tiny pieces of gold in the prostate to target the radiation to specific areas. These new options can be more effective than traditional external beam radiation by allowing the therapy to be more specifically targeted.

Proton Beam Therapy

• Proton beam therapy is an alternative to radiation that uses protons to kill the cancer instead of radiation beams. Proton therapy may allow doctors to deliver higher energy rays to tumor cells, with less damage to healthy tissue, because the rays do not deliver doses beyond the tumor boundary, as photon (electric beam radiation) rays do.