The hormone therapy is generally known under the name of androgen deprivation therapy (ADT).



This treatment method is included in the list of conventional treatments for prostate cancer, being discovered in 1941 by Charles B. Huggins while conducting several research studies by using estrogen to oppose the production of testosterone. The “chemical castration” is done by depriving the organism of testosterone because it was discovered the fact that the male androgenic hormone is the cause of the rapid growth of the cancerous cells in the prostate gland.

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For this treatment procedure, two drugs are being used: the LH-RH agonists block the LH-RH produced by the organism and the anti-androgenic drugs, stopping the testosterone effects on the prostate.

The great disadvantage of using this treatment procedure is that the tumor can always reappear, being more aggressive in comparison to the first time.

It is true that each form of treatment has its side effects so you should stay well informed about the procedure you opt for in case you are diagnosed with this disease.

Besides decreasing the quality of life when impotence and breast enlargement known as gynecomastia tend to appear, the side effects of hormone therapy are usually much more serious leading to death sometimes. The androgen deprivation therapy can increase the risk of a coronary artery disease, the result being death caused by a cardiovascular disorder. Statistics have also shown that the hormone treatment significantly increased the risk of death in patients who opted for the surgical procedure or prostatectomy for localized cancer of the prostate.

There is also an increased risk of developing incident diabetes.

If we are talking about metastatic cancer, the doctor’s suggestion is to keep in balance the negative after effects, like the cardiac risk, with an aggressive nutritional diet, plenty of exercises daily and using lipid lowering drugs.

Hormone therapy can always be complemented with the expectant management or watchful waiting procedure but it would probably be better to consult your doctor about that before deciding.

If you are not satisfied with what you hear about the hormone therapy there are some other conventional treatments you can always choose from. But do keep in mind that we are not talking about what procedure you like the best, we are talking about what treatment method applies better in your case; since the prostate cancer is categorized in different stages, describing how spread is the tumor, there are also treatments available for each type of cancer.

The best option for preventing such a disease is to regularly consult a doctor, perform the screening tests and try to maintain a healthy life by making exercises everyday and eat natural products. This could be the first important step to gain a long life without worries!

It is a lucky thing that we can talk about prostate cancer treatments, since we do know cancer is a ravaging disease, affecting a great part of the world’s population.

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Side effects do exist though, and each particular treatment procedure may has its own set of side effects.

Basically there are two accepted treatment procedures: the conventional one and the alternative treatment.

The first includes surgery, chemotherapy and radiation therapy, while the alternative method includes herbal therapy, homeopathy, physical body relaxation exercises, the use of magnetic field and hydrotherapy, etc.

We can’t actually say prostate cancer has side effects, because cancer is a disease that gravelly affects the functioning of the organism, especially when it’s an advanced stage.

The well known prostate cancer symptoms are frequent urination or weak urine stream, burning or pain while urinating, blood in urine or semen, painful ejaculation, back pains, stiffness, ache. When we talk about advanced cancer, bone pain is the most common of all, the cancer spreading fast to the lungs and liver causing coughing and chest pains, yellow skin and pain in the abdomen. If the spinal cord is affected by the prostate cancer it can cause a compression of the spine, resulting in weakness or fecal and urinary incontinence.

The side effects of the prostate cancer can actually appear only after we start a treatment, and since the purpose of this article is to talk about the prostate cancer side effects I’ll make a short list, depending on the treatment procedure used.

Surgery, also know as prostatectomy includes the risks of local bleeding, one per cent among men with ages between sixty five and sixty nine die because of the operation, anesthesia, impotence in about thirty five point five per cent cases or incontinence, in four point five per cent cases. For impotence there are treatments like Viagra or sildenafil tablets, devices to help stiffen the penis, injections with Caverject or the penile prosthesis; incontinence can be treated with medications or by using an artificial sphincter implanted around the urethra.

The radiation therapy is the second most common form of conventional treatment and its side effect are incontinence or impotence.

Cancerous cells tend to reappear after some time and the great disadvantage of the androgen deprivation therapy is its temporary effectiveness and serious side effects like cardiovascular diseases, breast enlargement or impotence.

Besides the evident hair loss, chemotherapy has its own set of side effects, even though we are talking about a long lasting treatment procedure, used even in leukemia cases.

Cryotherapy is the newest medical treatment procedure and its side effects are still being studied. The results gathered until today concluded that it may cause fistulas that leak urine, infections, the blockage of the urethra and sometimes an ineffectiveness of the freezing liquid inserted to kill the cancerous cells.

There are many other side effects and the doctor is responsible of keeping the patient informed about it. You are probably wondering why only conventional treatment side effects are mentioned. Usually the medical approach of curing a disease could be regarded as a bit more radical just because we are talking about a direct intervention on the damaged area of the body. This exact radical approach can have different results and even if we talk about a definite cure for the disease the side effects may still exist.

A correct treatment may decrease the number of the side effects.

The erectile dysfunction can have a great negative impact on sexual life on a man. This means the inability to have a satisfactory erection for the sexual intercourse. The treatments for prostate cancer can cause erectile dysfunction. The treatments that can cause erectile dysfunction are: cryosurgery, hormone therapy, radiation therapy and surgery to remove the entire prostate gland.

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The type of surgery, the skill of the surgeon and the stage of the cancer can have an impact on the severity of the erectile dysfunction. For a better recovery of the erectile function after the first year after the surgery it must be used a nerve sparing technique. There is a very slim chance of recovery if it had used a non-nerve sparing surgery.

For men who have followed a radiation therapy there is a greater risk over time not to recover the erectile function. Diabetes or vascular problems can ad to the risk of losing erectile function. For rapid blood flow in the penis there are medications such as tadalafil (Cialis), sildenafil (Viagra) and vardenafil (Levitra). Usually this drugs start to work after an hour and will last from 8 hours (vardenafil and sidenafil) up to 36 hours in the case of tadalafil. Although these drugs have helped patients who have undergo nerve sparing prostectomy to have erections, there are not suited for everyone.

Surgery and hormone treatment can have as side effect a lower interest in sex. The treatment with testosterone is not suitable in this cases because of the fact testosterone can contribute to growth of the cancer. There are hormones treatments such as anti-androgens (bicalutamide) that cannot affect sexual life especially interest of sex. Couples can cope better with these side effects if both partners are opened to discuss and find solution together.

There is not easy for a man to talk about his erectile problems even with his doctor. The good news is that the doctor might have treated this problems found to other men. He already knows what the prostate patient may encounter during the treatment. There are also prostate cancer organizations that offer counseling. The hardest thing is to talk to the partner mainly because of the fear of rejection.

If your partner is well informed and already knows all there is to know about the prostate cancer it will not be a big surprise when an erectile problem occurs. Together you will find a solution. The continuous research and the evolution of technology of treatments are focused on lowering the risk of impotence and helping men obtain spontaneous erections. Best examples are the newest equipment used for cryotherapy and brachytherapy focused on reducing the risk of occurrence of impotence after the treatment of prostate cancer. Other medical technique used for protecting the erectile function is the nerve-sparing technique used in prostatectomy.

There are treatments for erection dysfunction. Some of them are vacuum constriction device, penile suppositories, and penile implants. This methods work for many men but not for every case. There are patients that feel uncomfortable from wearing vacuum constriction device. Only 30 % of the persons using penile suppositories have positive results. Penile implants works better, but they require complicated surgery.

Proton therapy is a form of radiation different from conventional radiation particlest that can cause more damage to the healthy issue that to cure the damaged one. The advantage of proton therapy is that it uses precisely guided protons. This therapy has proved to be effective for treating many types of cancers such as pediatric, lung, brain, head and prostate cancer. This therapy is used when tumors have not spread to other parts of the body.
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The proton therapy centers are not so wide spread since this was practiced only in research facilities. Not all doctors may be familiar with the benefits of proton therapy. This therapy allows pacients to continue their daily activities during the sessions that takes six to eight weeks since is a non invasive therapy. Trough imaging techniques radiation oncologists determin the exact location of the tumor that has to be treated.

Treatment centers provide Proton treatment in United States are as follow: M D Anderson Proton Therapy Center; Florida Proton Therapy Institute in Jacksonville, Florida; Midwest Proton Radiotherapy Institute in Bloomington, IN; Loma Linda, CA; the Francis H. Burr Proton Therapy Center in Boston; Roberts Cancer Center at University of Pennsylvania who will operate in Philadelphia; in Oklahoma City there is  Procure Proton Therapy. Before you would go to a therapy center contact the financial counselors of that center to find out the coverage of your health insurance, usually these cover proton therapy. These prior discussion is good to reduce any financial uncertainties.

Prior to starting your treatment with proton therapy consult your physician to review all the details regarding side effect. It si known that proton therapy is less damaging than other form of radiation therapy mainly because proton therapy will deliver radiation dose only to the treatment site and cand do less damage to healthy tissue located around that tumor. The treatment with proton therapy last eight weeks with 5 days a week sessions.

In the world there were 26 proton therapy centers at the end of 2008 in Germany, Italy, Korea, Canada, England, Russia, China, South Africa, China, Sweden, France, Usa, Germany that have treated more than 60000 patients. The equipment are cost prohibitive to be wide spread. Cyclotron and syncrotron are very expensive equipments. Teams of engineers are working to develop small synchrotron and cyclotron systems at an affordable price for more hospitals so that proton therapy can cure more patients.

The side effects from proton therapy treatment are less frequent than the one from standard x-ray radiation. Because of the fact that less healthy tissue is exposed during this treatment patientss do not feel discomfort or any pain during treatment. Anyway there are some side effects that can occur on the area where proton beam enters the body to the tumor such as temporary hair loss, fatigue. Your doctor can give you all the details regarding other side effects related to the area that is treated.

Although proton therapy and x-ray therapy are similar because they use radiation, they are different in the form they deliver this radiation for treating tumor. Proton beams are more controled an cand deposit the radiation directly on the tumor with a reduced risk of damaging the surrounding health tissue. The x-ray is harder to be controlled thus increasing the risk of damaging the healthy tissue during treatment.

One of the treatments for prostate cancer is surgery. If you want to know about prostate cancer and side effects of surgery, you should first know what prostate cancer is and what treatments there are out there against this disease.

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The prostate is a muscular glandular organ, situated just below the bladder in the prostatic capsule, surrounding the top portion of the urethra. The prostate is of chestnut form at the lower end of the bladder. The dorsal face of the prostate comes in connection with the rectum, making it possible to be touched through the anus. In a man aged 20 to 25, the prostate is 4-4.5 cm long, 3-5 cm wide and weighing about 20 grams, having a diameter of about 38 millimeters.

The prostate is a delicate organ and quite moody, requiring care, even though it is neglected by most men. Prostatitis is a prostate infection that occurs mainly in young men. Prostate adenoma is a benign tumor, known as the prostatic hypertrophy or periurethral adenoma. Prostate cancer, commonly in men over 50 years, occupies an important place in urologic pathology. It has a slow, insidious clinical course, with no immediate and noticeable events, being often found incidentally, in a general clinical examination.

The prostate adenocarcinoma is the most common malignant tumor in men. Thanks to early detection and appropriate treatment, the disease can be effectively fought today. In case of advanced cancer, hormonal therapy is indicated or radio-hormone therapy (the hormone treatment combined with radiotherapy). In metastatic cancer, hormone therapy is associated with chemotherapy).

If the tumor is located at the prostate (stage T1 and T2), the standard practice is surgical treatment associated with radiotherapy. T4 tumors should be treated initially with chemotherapy and hormone, tumor irradiation is useful in controlling local or remote metastases. As a palliative, the doctor can use different surgical procedures.

When the diagnosis is made, the question is of course of treatment. Although prostate cancer has a reputation to move slowly, in fact, its speed of evolution is often unpredictable. Most often, prostate cancer is found between the ages of 60 and 70. At this age, the evolution of cancer may have a direct impact on the patient’s life expectancy, but treatment is, however, indispensable. If cancer is discovered at an age over 80 years, the doctor will estimate the benefits of surgery, depending on the speed of evolution of cancer.

Surgery can be: -curative (removing the primary tumor and healing), -palliative - to improve symptoms (with the purpose to improve the quality of life and in some cases for longer survival), -emergency (in cases of intestinal occlusion, decompression, bleeding) or reconstruction after mutilating interventions (post mastectomy).

There is no special connection between prostate cancer and side effects of surgery. Generally the side effects of surgery can produce infirmities (amputations of limbs, nose, ears, mastectomy or breast removal, enucleating or removal of an eye, keloid scars), lymphedema (of the arm post mastectomy, the lower limb after excision of pelvic lymph), abdominal pain syndrome (caused of adherences or clamps occurring after surgery on the abdomen).