Treatment Options

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—how aggressive it is and how far it has progressed.

At SCCA, you will be cared for by a care provider team who can offer you 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 different from other cancers in that it grows slowly over 10 to 20 years—and may never move beyond the prostate. Therefore, it is unclear whether treatment always helps men with prostate cancer live longer. For some men, the side effects of treatment—impotence and incontinence—may be worse than the disease.

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

Chemotherapy is rarely used to treat prostate cancer initially, but it has been shown to benefit men whose prostate cancer has spread, or metastasized. If you have advanced prostate cancer, your doctor will probably recommend managing the disease with hormone therapy, radiation or chemotherapy, rather than surgery.

There have been many advancements in radiation treatment over the years. In 2008, SCCA brought in new technology that improves external beam radiation treatment. Calypso Medical manufactures the Calypso® System now referred to as GPS for the Body® which provides clinicians with an innovative solution for target localization and continuous monitoring of the prostate in real time during radiation therapy delivery.

The Cancer Profiler For more information about a type and stage of cancer, please try the The Cancer Profiler, a free decision support tool brought to you by the Seattle Cancer Care Alliance (SCCA) and NexCura, Inc. The Cancer Profiler enables cancer patients and their physicians to make better informed treatment decisions using information from evidence-based, peer-reviewed medical literature.

For more information on treatment options, go to:

• Surgery
• Radiation therapy
• Hormone therapy
• Chemotherapy
• Watchful waiting
• Treating advanced prostate cancer

February 2008