What You Should Know About Prostate Cancer: Prostate Cancer

1. What is the prostate?

The prostate is a nonessential organ that surrounds the male urethra at the bladder neck. The gland can vary greatly is size between individuals. The largest prostate I ever removed was the size of a grapefruit and I have encountered many that were as large as a medium sized orange; however, most prostate glands, especially in young men, are the size of a small to medium sized walnut.

Two things happen to the prostate that can impair a male’s health as he grows older. First, and most commonly, the prostate tends to increase in size and by so doing obstructs the flow of urine. This is a benign condition commonly referred to as BPH (benign prostatic hypertrophy). There are drugs, such as Proscar, that are somewhat successful in treating this condition by shrinking the prostate and a variety of surgical procedures that are designed to relieve urethral obstruction by removing the interior of the prostate gland.

The second, and potentially vastly more dangerous, change that may develop in the males prostate as they age is the malignancy commonly referred to as prostate cancer. That, of course, is the primary subject of this eBook.

2. What are some of the important characteristics of prostate cancer?

Prostate cancer is the most common non-skin cancer in males and is the second most common cancer cause of death in males, right after lung cancer. The bad news is that 1 in 6 males will develop prostate cancer in his lifetime; the good news is that the malignancy is entirely curable if diagnosed when it is still within the confines of the prostatic capsule.

Prostate cancer tends to be a more benign disease in older males as shown by the fact that around 80% of elderly males who die from unrelated conditions have prostate cancer that had not been diagnosed prior to death. Nonetheless, prostate cancer is an extremely serious disease as shown by the fact that over 217,000 males were diagnosed with prostate cancer in 2010 and over 32,000 died from the malignancy.

My experience in treating prostate cancer at the Veterans Administration Medical Center in Martinez California, suggested that prostate cancer was a must more aggressive tumor in black men than it was in Caucasian males. This observation has been confirmed by numerous workers in the field. The fact is that black males are 1.5 times more likely to develop prostate cancer than are their Caucasian counterparts and are 2 to 3 times more likely to die from the disease. I believe that this is due to the fact that the Gleason scores (the histological grade of the cancer) are, on average, much higher in newly diagnosed black men with prostate cancer than they are in white males of the same age when they are first found to have the