I saw this on the national news last night and thought the results of the study were interesting:
The study directly compared the three approaches — surgery to remove tumors, radiation treatment and monitoring. Most prostate cancer grows slowly, so it takes many years to look at the disease’s outcomes.
“There was no difference in prostate cancer mortality at 15 years between the groups,” Loeb said. And prostate cancer survival for all three groups was high — 97% regardless of treatment approach. “That’s also very good news.”
That’s going to make a whole lot of guys go, “Huh?!?” The science may say it’s okay to do nothing, but once you hear “cancer,” it will be extraordinarily difficult to not want to do something more proactive. It will be interesting to see if guys stop or cut back on getting screened, and we wind up with more men being diagnosed with advanced prostate cancer instead of localized prostate cancer because they delayed screening.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/study-finds-prostate-cancer-treatment-can-wait-men-rcna74512
Here is the New England Journal of Medicine article (I didn’t sign up for full access):
Thanks Dan, this is often a thought lurking around us.
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div>I’d like to hear from men who eschewed treatment and who have now been told death is imminent. Looking back wh
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I’m British, but have lived in France for 18 years. In 2019, at age 70, I was diagnosed with prostate cancer at ‘8’ on the richter scale. I opted for surgery and my prostate was removed along with surrounding tissue, some six months after diagnosis. Some people told me that prostate cancer was so slow growing that I’d be wise to ignore it and avoid the side effects of surgery, but my research said otherwise. Given the situation of the NHS in the UK where a nasty right-wing government is doing its utmost to destroy their wonderful free health service and substitute privatisation, it seems likely that such ‘ignore it’ reports would be seized on with delight by the politicians, who almost certainly have private health care. Of course, some men do have slow-growing prostate cancer (my friend’s father lived to 98 with his) but not everyone is so fortunate.
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