Prostate cancer is the second-most common form of cancer among men, and it’s the second-leading cause of cancer deaths among men, according to the American Cancer Society. That’s enough to give any man in the later stages of life pause.
But with just a little vigilance, prostate cancer is far from a death sentence. In fact, most men who are diagnosed with cancer don’t die from it. According to the ACS, though one out of every seven men will be diagnosed with prostate cancer, only one out of 39 will die from it. Nearly 3 million men in the United States have or have had prostate cancer.
And despite September being recognized as National Prostate Cancer Awareness Month, prostate cancer isn’t a concern at all for many men before the age of 50. It’s rare in younger men.
“Most men do not need to be screened before the age of 50, depending on family history,” said Dr. Noah Allen, a urologist with St. Elizabeth Physicians. “African-American men and men with immediate family members who have had prostate cancer before the age of 65 are at a higher risk to have the disease themselves and should consider earlier screening.”
Doctors are changing the way they approach both screening and treatment of prostate cancer. In the past, prostate examinations were performed on men with no symptoms, but that’s no longer true. And prostate cancer could be detected using less invasive means, like a prostate-specific antigen (PSA) test, which only requires a blood sample.
According to the U.S. National Library of Medicine, the potential benefits of PSA testing as a routine screening test have not been shown to outweigh the harms of testing and treatment.” Though Allen acknowledges that it’s a point of debate among physicians, he believes that a PSA test every other year “will help identify only the rises in PSA that are most suspicious for cancer.”
“Urologists are getting better with knowing which types of prostate cancers have potential to cause harm and require treatment,” Allen said, “and those which can simply be watched in a protocol called active surveillance.”
Surgery and radiation therapy used to be go-to treatments for all forms of prostate cancer, but active surveillance is considered a viable option today. It could include a combination of PSA testing, rectal exams, and prostate biopsies at regular intervals.