At the first ever Active Surveillance Convention, a conference I attended back in 2007, many experts openly bemoaned that the word “CANCER” profoundly overstates the significance of Gleason 6 type of prostate cancer. The pathologists at the conference, however, shot down the idea of a name change saying, “Under the microscope it looks like a cancer, so it is cancer.” No one at the conference had    a rebuttal so the proposal for a name change was dropped.

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Prostate size is an additional factor besides Gleason score, PSA, and the percentage of core biopsies involved with cancer, that needs to be considered when going through the treatment selection process.

Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre’s Laurence Klotz, MD, speaks with PCRI about management of low-risk prostate cancer with Active Surveillance. 

What is active surveillance, and how does it compare with other methods of treating prostate cancer?

The concept of conservative management for prostate cancer is not new. In fact, in Scandinavia and England in the 70s, basically no one was treated until they had metastatic disease. And the idea was that treatment....

We're pleased to announce that we'll be working with KMI on videos for the new SHADES program. Stay tuned for more information on this groundbreaking patient education series.

In the mean, time check out our Prostate Cancer 101 video series below: 

Interpreting a Pathology Report By Jonathan Epstein, MD | Johns Hopkins University

Patients should personally review their pathology report; the expert description of the information obtained from the needle biopsy. In this article, Dr. Epstein answers 15 common questions about understanding a pathology report.

"If you are looking about information about Prostate cancer for yourself or someone you love, you are going to encounter the Gleason Score. OK so what is it? At it’s simplest the Gleason score is a measure of how aggressive or nonaggressive a prostate cancer tumor is. 

This summary is from the 2015 Prostate Cancer Conference where in his lecture, Matthew Cooperberg, MD, spoke on Active Surveillance. Dr. Cooperberghas has been invited to present his research findings at many national and international conferences. 

In 2013, the American actress Angelina Jolie made a life-altering decision that fascinated the public and made the cover of Time magazine [1].  Based upon her family history and a genetic blood test for the BRCA1 gene, she was counseled that she had an 87% chance of developing breast cancer.  This led to her decision to undergo a preventive double mastectomy.  The Time article was titled “The Angelina Effect” and focused on the power of genomic medicine to guide clinical decision making.  A family history can be considered part of “clinical information” and would certainly increase the odds of developing breast cancer, but only the genomic test increased those odds such that a preventive procedure became a reasonable strategy.

While at Pete’s Coffee to write my bi-monthly blog I ran into another regular who occasionally hangs out at Pete’s. Vandana is a professor at Loyola University.  She is an expert in the psychology of learning.  While we were talking I started to bemoan my struggles to educate people about prostate cancer. One of the biggest bugaboos I face is how people overestimate their grasp of the prostate cancer situation. Once I verbalized my complaint, Vandana immediately proposed I create a basic test of prostate cancer knowledge so men could self-assess their level of knowledge.  Thanks Vandana!