Prostate Cancer. Prostate check for men.

Prostate cancer is a serious problem for the health and longevity. It is one of those taboo topics that men often choose to ignore until the problem becomes very serious. To prevent the condition a regular prostrate checks are recommended.

If you don’t know what your prostate is or what it does, you’re certainly not alone: most men don’t. But you really should. More than 30 million men suffer from prostate conditions that negatively affect their quality of life.

Over 50% of men in their 60s and as many as 90% in their 70s or older have symptoms of an enlarged prostate (BPH).

Each year over 230,000 men will be diagnosed with prostate cancer and about 30,000 will die of it.

Prostatitis is an issue for men of all ages and affects 35% of men aged 50 and older

Firstly, it is still pretty alarming to know the rate at which people die of prostate cancer. This type of cancer is among the top killers of all cancer types that affect men. Yes, recent statistics have revealed prostate type of cancer as the second killer of men, right after skin cancer. In America, African-American men have the highest number of cases diagnosed. Since the rate of deaths from prostate cancer patients has become alarming, medical researches have continued in various studies to develop more effective medications for this disease.

Treatment of Prostate Cancer

The treatment for prostate cancer is rather varied and follows quite a number of different approaches. Deciding on the best one depends on several factors, which include the overall health of the patient, the patient’s disposition, the doctor’s general expertise and intuition, and more importantly, the stage of the disease at the time of diagnosis, and its aggression.

Surgery – for prostate cancer, this is called a radical prostatectomy, which is essentially the surgical removal of the prostate gland of the patient in order to get rid of the cancer once and for all. This is decisive approach aimed at curing the disease, which is then most effective in the early stages. Prostatectomy may be considered as an adjutant therapy in later stages of the disease, and recent findings are suggesting that it might be able to extend life expectancy for later stages of the disease, but these are yet to be confirmed.

Radiation – referred to as radiotherapy or radiation therapy, this involves attacking the prostate cancer cells with ionizing radiation. The radiation generally harms everything in its way, but whilst the this cancerous tumor cells die, the normal cells are able to heal and recuperate. The treatment may be employed in just about every stage of the disease, but as a cure, it is only applicable in early stage disease. Two forms of radiation therapy exist: external beam radiation therapy, which applies the radiation from a linear accelerator; and internal radiation treatment (brachytherapy), which uses the implantation of radioactive seeds into the prostate. The former may be used more for advanced prostate malignant tumor, but locally advanced disease may require the combination of both.

Hormonal therapy – because it is a fact by this time that prostate cancer cells rely on the presence of dihydrotestosterone (DHT) to proliferate, oncologists attempt to hinder the body’s production of this endocrine hormone to halt the progression of the disease. To this end, an orchiectomy (surgical removal of the testicles) or drug therapy may be used to interrupt the synthesis of the hormone, leading to a stop of the disease’s progression, and sometimes even shrinkage. However, hormonal therapy is by no means a cure because the tumor later resumes its growth after it has adapted to the treatment. For this reason, hormonal therapy has to be combined with other treatments to cure, or employed in late stage disease to provide palliation for the patient