To be diagnosed with cancer, being it a skin or a prostate one, could alter the tranquil lives of all people out there, because, cruel as it might sound, if we are talking about the prostate cancer, all men in danger of being affected by it after the age of forty, if they don’t give to much thought about it and avoid the medical counseling.



It is true the fact that treatments for the prostate cancer are available but the results depend very much on how advanced is the tumor in the body, so it is probably better to detect this disease in its early stages.

Should note the fact that the prostate cancer has no early symptoms, so the only method to detect the existence of cancerous cells is through the screening tests or the prostate biopsy.

I shall detail these testing methods for a better understanding.

We do know that the cancer is not the only type of disease affecting the prostate gland so for an early and a better diagnose the screening tests are recommended.

These screening tests include two procedures: the digital rectal exam or DRE, when the doctor searches for a hardness or a lump on the surface of the prostate gland by inserting a gloved finger into the rectum, and the prostate specific antigen blood tests or PSA, used as an indicator for determining how spread is the tumor in the organism.

If the PSA test result indicates under four nanograms per milliliter of blood then it is considered as a normal result; the result between four and ten is at the borderline, depending on the patients age, genetic inheritance, symptoms and even race; a result higher than ten is abnormal; also if the values are between thirty and forty that definitely indicates the existence of a prostate cancer.

The results for this testing methods could be either normal, when the cancerous cells are not detected in the prostate gland, or abnormal, when the limit of ten nanograms per milliliter of blood is exceeded. In this later case the doctor will recommend a prostate biopsy.

The biopsy is a procedure described as the withdrawing of one or two small pieces of the prostate tissue, using a needle trans-rectally, all this done under the guidance of the ultrasound images of the prostate area; sometimes biopsies can be done near the lymph nodes, the urinary bladder or the rectum.

If the cancer has spread to the bones, radionuclide bone scans can confirm that, if we are talking about affected surrounding organs coaxial tomography or CAT scans and magnetic resonance imaging or MRI scans can tell how much the cancer has spread in these areas; there is also a new method of biopsy known as the prostate mapping that combines the template-guided multiple biopsies with the multi-sequence MRI scans and is done under general anesthetic, by taking thirty to fifty biopsies through the skin area found in front of the back passage.

If cancer is diagnosed, the Gleason scale is used to classify the stages of the cancer: scores from two to four indicate a slow growing tumor, scores from five to six indicate an intermediate aggressiveness of the tumor, while scores from seven to ten indicate the rapid growth of the cancerous tumor; the staging process indicates how spread is the disease, and there are usually four stages: stage I, stage II, stage III and stage IV.

The treatment will be prescribed according to how advanced is the prostate cancer, but doctors will also take in consideration a patient’s age, health history records and, of course, his preferences.