Prostate Cancer
- Prostate cancer is the most common cancer (after skin cancer) in men in this country.
- About 10,000 Australian men are diagnosed with prostate cancer each year, although not all require immediate or major treatment.
What should you expect from treatment?
If the cancer is confined to the prostate gland itself, cure rates can be very high with either surgery or high dose radiation therapy.
Radiation may be delivered:
- By a machine called a linear accelerator, daily, over approximately 7 weeks (a therapy known as external beam therapy, or EBT).
- this can be given via simple techniques or via special highly advanced techniques such as conformal 3-D radiation (a technique that uses scanners to produce images of the cancerous area, allowing radiation to be delivered in high doses in precisely the right area), or Intensity Modulated Radiation Therapy (IMRT), a technique that treats the tumour with small beams of different strengths of radiation.
- By brachytherapy where radioactive sources are placed into the prostate gland directly
- either using small iodine pellets
- or catheters which are driven by computer to deliver iridium (radiation) directly through the cancerous area
- By a combination of both external beam and brachytherapy.
What side effects can you expect?
These days, radiotherapy is generally well tolerated. The recent developments of high tech scanning with CT (computed tomography) scans and MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) have revolutionised the localisation of the prostate cancer sites. This has made it possible to target precisely the prostate and to minimise the radiation dose given to other structures such as the bladder and bowel. We are also now able to deliver higher dose radiation and that translates into higher cure rates. However, there are still some risks to bowel function, bladder irritability and potency. You should discuss these issues with your doctor.
Please feel free to read the attached clinical brief below prepared by Dr. Gerald Fogarty and Dr. Michael Izard: