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.

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. 

There is no easy way to receive the news that you have cancer, but it is important to realize that prostate cancer is typically not a death sentence. In fact the vast majority of men diagnosed with prostate cancer have the low-risk form of the disease, and will live a normal life span. Even those men diagnosed with the more aggressive kind of prostate cancer have effective treatment options available to them today.