Expert Outlines Prostate Cancer Treatment Options for Awareness Month

In an interview with CURE, Dr. David A. Taub highlighted Prostate Cancer Awareness Month by outlining current treatment options for patients with prostate cancer.

Prostate cancer is recognized every September, according to the American Association for Cancer Research website. As one of the most common type of diagnosed cancer in men in the United States, it is also the second leading cause of cancer deaths in men, after lung cancer.

Taub is a urologist and the director of urologic oncology at Eugene M. & Christine E. Lynn Cancer Institute at Boca Raton Regional Hospital, part of Baptist Health.

Transcript

What treatment options currently exist for patients with prostate cancer, and how do doctors decide which approach is best for each patient?

There are four main ways to treat prostate cancer. The first is active surveillance. A lot of prostate cancer that we diagnose is slower growing and lower volume. Studies out of England or Europe have shown that some of these earlier-stage and non-aggressive cancers can be present for 10 or 15 years without causing any increase in death or problems. So, watching the cancer and surveilling it is an option. We do that by checking the PSA (prostate specific antigen) on a more regular basis, about twice a year, and checking the MRI a little more frequently, as well as repeating biopsies to make sure nothing is progressing. Active surveillance is the mainstay for low-risk prostate cancer.

Then there are more intermediate or aggressive cancers that require either surgery — we do robotic surgery, which is the mainstay of prostate cancer treatment — or radiation. There are a multitude of radiation treatments, including IMRT (Intensity-Modulated Radiation Therapy), proton radiation therapy, and MRI Linac (Linear Accelerator). There's a plethora of radiation options.

The last option is focal therapy. We've been using focal therapy for different types of cancers. For instance, when I treat kidney cancer, we'll remove the part of the kidney with the tumor but not the whole kidney. For breast cancer, women often get a lumpectomy rather than a radical mastectomy. Prostate cancer has been lagging a little bit, but some research has shown that we can get good disease control with fewer side effects if we focus on treating just the area where the cancer is and leaving the rest of the prostate alone. We can do that with something called HIFU, which is high-intensity focused ultrasound. We can also do it with cryoablation (freezing that area), or with something called NanoKnife, which is irreversible electroporation.

There's a bunch of them, and so we try to fit the right modality with the right patient.

Transcript has been edited for clarity and conciseness.

Reference

1. “September is Prostate Cancer Awareness Month,” by the American Association for Cancer Research. https://www.aacr.org/patients-caregivers/awareness-months/prostate-cancer-awareness-month/

For more news on cancer updates, research and education, don’t forget to subscribe to CURE®’s newsletters here.