Prostate Cancer

Prostate cancer is an increasingly commonly diagnosed cancer. More and more men are being found to have the condition because many more men are asking to be screened for it due to the greater awareness that media attention has generated in recent years. However the number of men dying of prostate cancer remains fairly constant at about 10,000 per year in the UK, most of whom are in their 70s and 80s. Autopsy and other studies looking at the natural history of prostate cancer have shown that it is increasingly common with advancing age such that by the age of 80, about 80% of men will have evidence of cancer within their prostates. However the vast majority of these men will have no symptoms and will not be destined to die of prostate cancer but of something else. This is partly because many prostate cancers do not behave in an aggressive way and so they do not ever grow quickly enough to cause problems in a person’s lifetime. Prostate cancer is therefore more worrying when it develops in younger men or if it is aggressive – in these circumstances it may cause symptoms and potentially become life threatening. However we do not have an accurate way of predicting how an individual patient’s cancer is going to behave, or what the future holds for them in the way of other diseases. One of the major challenges in prostate cancer is therefore the fact that if we were to diagnose and treat all men with the disease, we would be treating very large numbers of men unnecessarily as they were never destined to have problems nor to die from their prostate cancer.