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If you have prostate cancer, the treatment your doctor or doctors suggest will depend on several factors, including your age, your general state of health, and the cancer itself—whether it is early-stage disease or advanced disease.

 

At SCCA, you may choose your doctor according to the treatment you would like to receive. Or, you may choose to meet with a team of providers who will collaborate and discuss the best options for treatment for your cancer.

 

As a patient at SCCA you have access to all the treatment options currently available, as well as new therapies offered only in clinical trials. This is one advantage of seeking treatment at SCCA, which has two strong research organizations behind it: Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center and UW Medicine.

 

Prostate cancer is a complex disease. In some cases, it grows slowly over 10 to 20 years—and may never move beyond the prostate. How this disease is treated is different than the treatment for advanced, aggressive disease, which may be treated with surgery, radiation, chemotherapy, or hormone therapy.

 

The choice that you make for your treatment is a personal and individual one. The key to making a good decision is getting input from an experienced team of leading prostate cancer specialists who know what the outcomes and quality of life issues are with each treatment.

Watchful Waiting

If you are a man who has been diagnosed with prostate cancer at age 70 or 75, your doctor may recommend "watchful waiting" rather than more aggressive treatment such as surgery or radiation therapy.

Surgery

If your cancer is localized to the prostate, and you are in reasonably good health and younger than 75 years old, your doctors may recommend that you have surgery to treat your prostate cancer. The most common procedure is called a radical prostatectomy.

Radiation Therapy

If you have localized prostate cancer, your doctor will probably give you a choice of treating your disease with either surgery or radiation. At this point, no studies have definitively established that one treatment is better than the other.

Hormone Therapy

If you have advanced prostate cancer at the time of your diagnosis, or if your PSA levels are rising despite having had other treatment for prostate cancer in the past, your doctor may suggest hormone therapy.

Chemotherapy

If you have been diagnosed with advanced prostate cancer, or if your cancer has returned after previous treatment, your doctor may recommend chemotherapy.

Treating Advanced Prostate Cancer

Despite treatment, prostate cancer sometimes recurs. A prostate tumor can grow beyond the prostate gland, and cancer cells also can travel through the lymph system or through the blood to reach other parts of the body, such as the bones.

New Treatments for Prostate Cancer

There have been many advancements in Radiation treatment over the years. External beam radiotherapy (EBRT), intensity modulated radiotherapy (IMRT), and 3D-Conformal Radiation Therapy (CRT) all accelerate subatomic particles called electrons to generate waves of high energy photon radiation.