Staging and Grading of Prostate Cancer

Staging and Grading

Once the diagnosis of prostate cancer has been made the disease has to be staged and graded. The stage refers to the extent and spread of the disease while the grade refers to the nature (aggressiveness) of the particular tumor. Staging will determine the extent of disease and provide important prognostic information that will influence the management decisions.

Staging investigations - PSA - X-rays of lumbar spine and pelvis - Chest X-ray - Radionuclitide bone scan - MTI scan of pelvis

TNM Staging system

T stage (extent of primary lesion)

- T1 - tumor confined to prostate, not palpable or visible on TRUS - T2 - tumor palpable or visible on TRUS but confined to prostate - T3 - spread beyond the prostatic capsule - T3a - extracapsular spread only - T3b - involvement of the seminal vesicles - T4 - invasion into rectal wall, bladder neck or pelvic wall N (Nodal) status - N0 - regional nodes not involved - N1 - regional nodes involved by tumor M (Distant Metastases) - M0 - no distant metastases - M1 - distant metastases present

Grading

Grading refers to what the cancer looks like under a microscope. The most commonly used system is the Gleason grade and score. The glandular pattern is compared to that of a normal prostate and scored out of 5, where 1 resembles a pattern very close to normal and 5 resembles severely distorted glandular architecture. The two predominant glandular patterns within the cancer are graded out of 5 and the combined score calculated out of 10. The higher the Gleason score, the more aggressive is the tumor and the worse is the prognosis. Patients with cancers confined to the prostate (T1 and T2) and no involvement of the lymph nodes or other organs (N0 and M0) are potentially curable by surgery or radiotherapy. Patients with disease beyond the prostate are not curable.

With our next information – we will inform you about the “Risk factors for enlarged prostate” – so you should have a look on this site in the next 2 weeks! If you have any question sends us your e-mail.

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Fritz Frei make it easy to check out the important details about the diagnoses and test's of the prostate cancer. To receive more information's about all cancer -questions - Links and last research NEW's - visit the http://www.cancer-info.info/.

What to do For Enlarged Prostate or for Prostate Cancer

By age of 50, most men will already have an enlarged prostate and three of these men will have cancer cells forming in their prostate. Prostate cancer is the main cancer found in men and by age 75 three out of four men will have prostate cancer.

The facts are pretty clear, if you are a male you will have to deal with BPH, enlarged prostate, or prostate cancer.

So how do you know if you have BPH or prostate cancer? Well, here are a few of the symptoms:

" getting up at night to urinate
" having difficulty urinating
" not completely emptying your bladder
" having pain during sex
" having pain when urinating

Medical test that you can get for enlarged prostate or prostate cancer.

" PSA, prostate specific antigen, which gives a good indication of your prostate health
" PAP, prostate acid phosphatase, a test that is more accurate than PSA, but many doctors don't use it or are unfamiliar with it.
" Sonogram is a safe and accurate way to check your prostate
" MRI, magnetic resonance imaging, is also accurate but is the most expensive test.

There is other tests that doctors like to make and that is,

Biopsy of the prostate - Don't have it done. It's very harmful to the prostate and should never be done.

The ideal way to take care of prostate health issues is to change or improve you diet and lifestyle. Here are some area that you need to look at to make changes.

" diet
" supplement
" fasting
" hormone balancing
" eliminate addictive substances - smoking, alcohol, coffee, non-herbal tea)
" exercise
" stress, anxiety, and emotional issues

The first thing you need to do is start using a supplement that will start to heal your prostate condition. Then you need to change your diet. Here I will tell which supplement to buy immediately and in another article I will outline a good diet to follow.

Go out and immediately but a supplement that contains Beta-sitosterol. You will find beta-sitosterol in saw palmetto and pygeum africanum, but these herbal plants have very little beta-sitosterol. This make them useless for prostate health. You need 325 to 610 mg per day and these herbal products 30 mg or less.

A good beta-sitosterol to buy is the NSI Phytosterol Complex with Beta-sitosterol -- 240 Tablets. This is only $20.00 plus shipping.

You will find this product contains the following ingredients:

Betasitosterol
Stigmasterol
Campesterol
Brassicasterol

All of these chemicals are called Phytosterol, which are consider the fat inside a plant. These sterols have an anti-inflammatory property and help to buildup your immune system. They have been found effective in reducing the inflammation of the prostate, BPH, lowering cholesterol, and aiding in many other illnesses.

Take the first step in keeping a health prostate and avoid having to deal with enlarged prostate or prostate cancer. Look for more of my articles on prostate health.

Rudy Silva is a natural nutritionist. For more information and tips on a prostate diet that helps prostate cancer or an enlarged prostate go to: http://www.enlargeprostateinformation.com/.

10 Important Steps To Beat Your Prostate Cancer

Prostate cancer is the most common cancer in men in the United States and it is the second most common cause of cancer death in men over age 55. The incidence of prostate cancer increases dramatically with each decade after 50. Fortunately, prostate cancer tends to be slow-growing compared to many other cancers – the majority of prostate cancers either do not spread or cause any significant harm for decades.

In general, men run a 1-in-6 chance of developing prostate cancer at some point in their lives. More than 230,000 new cases are expected this year in the United States, with about 27,000 deaths.

Most men will choose conventional treatment, often surgery or radiation, but there are life-changing potential side effects they need to be aware of, and discuss with their doctors.

Surgery, called a prostatectomy for the surgical removal of the prostate gland, means impotence for about 75% of the men choosing this path, according to a September 2004 study published in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute. Also, about 14% of the men were incontinent – could not control their bladder – five years after the operation.

With standard radiation therapy, the odds of impotence are about the same, 73%. The incontinence rate was much lower, just under 5%. There are new radiation therapies we discussed in the new guidebook How To Beat Your Prostate Cancer that have better outcomes.

No matter what conventional therapy a man chooses, if he does nothing else there is a 30% to 40% chance that his cancer or another cancer will recur. That’s because his immune system was not strong enough to protect him from the first cancer, and if he does nothing it will be no stronger the next time it is needed. In addition, radiation and chemotherapy depress the immune system, leaving it weaker than it was before you got treatment. Finally, any cancerous cells that survive the radiation and chemotherapy treatments, or escape the surgeon’s knife – and a few ALWAYS do – must be cleaned up by the immune system. Yet those cells that survived radiation or chemotherapy are, by definition, the strongest mutant cells. Cells that survive chemotherapy even have their own name: Multi-drug resistant. All of this means that if a man’s cancer recurs, the cure rates the second time around are much, much lower – on the order of 5% survival.

So even if a man chooses conventional treatment, the information and advice on alternative treatments in How To Beat Your Prostate Cancer is very important for his recovery and continued good health.

Here are 5 of the 10 important steps covered in a Free Report by the authors of How To Beat Your Prostate Cancer that have worked for others:

1. Pick a doctor carefully. The numbers above on impotence and incontinence are pretty scary. Top surgeons who perform hundreds of these operations tend to have better numbers, and you should ALWAYS get the statistics in advance from any doctor before you let them treat you. Remember that if you are talking to a surgeon, he probably will want to operate. If your doctor is a radiation oncologist, don’t be surprised if he pushes radiation. A clinical oncologist might counsel chemotherapy. Always consider the source. If you want to try alternative therapy first, since you really are not pressed for time, choose an alternative doctor or health care practitioner just as carefully.

2. Boost your immune system. If you’re going to undergo conventional treatment, you need to boost your immune system to deal with the impact of chemotherapy and radiation. You also need to clean up the remaining cells after therapy, and then build back your immune system so cancer does not recur. If you are going to pursue an alternative treatment path while you have the time, boosting your immune system is Job #1. Several chapters in How To Beat Your Prostate Cancer show you how to do that.

3. Alkalize your internal environment. Cancer cells are highly acidic, and cancer can’t live in an alkaline environment. You can test your pH level with test strips from the pharmacy or health food store. It should be over 7.0, preferably in the 7.2 to 7.4 range. If your internal body environment is acidic, it makes it much easier for cancer to grow and metastasize. Prostate cancer often metastasizes to the bones, making it much harder to beat.

4. Get more oxygen to your cells. Cancer hates oxygen. In the lab, when they are doing an experiment where they want cancerous cells to grow quickly, they simply turn down the oxygen. When they want to stabilize the experiment, they turn the oxygen back up. The same is true of your body.

5. Take vitamins and supplements. If you eat the Standard American Diet, you are eating fruits and vegetables grown on depleted soil, picked too early so they won’t ripen and spoil while they’re in the distribution chain, and then probably overcooked. Even if you are eating organic fruits and vegetables, grass-fed pastured meat and raw milk, you still can’t get the massive amounts of vitamins and supplements you need to let your immune system overcome a cancerous tumor that has become established. You must take high-quality vitamins and minerals, digestive enzymes and specific anti-cancer supplements like those recommended in Chapter 7 of How To Beat Your Prostate Cancer.

* * * * *

The complete Free Report with all 10 important steps a man can take to begin fighting his prostate cancer right away can be obtained from http://www.beat-prostate-cancer.net/.

Michael Murphy is the Executive Director of the Cures Research Institute, an organization dedicated to combining the best of conventioal and alternative medicine to drmatically improve outcomes for people with health problems. © Cures Research Institute 2006

Prostate Cancer Treatments - Restore Hope

For most men, the initial thought after receiving their diagnosis centers on prostate cancer treatments. Fortunately, the options are many, though some therapies respond to various cancer stages better than others.

At the outset, two of the most common forms of treatment are surgery and radiation. Surgery effectively removes the cancer cells manually or through the use of less invasive lasers. Radiation therapy involves killing or shrinking the cancer cells with high energy x-rays via an external source or by implanting a radioactive "seed" near the cancer site.

For more advanced or recurring cases of prostate cancer, chemotherapy is frequently used. Though often believed to be the same as radiation, chemotherapy relies on drugs that are typically administered intravenously to destroy the cancer cells.

In addition to chemotherapy, if the prostate cancer spreads to other sites on the body or for fighting advanced or metastatic stages, hormone therapy and biophosphates are commonly employed. Hormone therapy draws on drugs that impede testosterone production, while biophosphate treatments work to offset the bone weakness that hormone therapy can produce.

These are all treatments administered by medical professionals, but complementary therapies, also known as alternative or holistic treatments, have been found to support more traditional methods. Examples of these treatments are herbal medicines and vitamin supplements, therapeutic massage and other forms of healing touch, and harnessing mental energy to aid in healing.

While these treatments are all currently available, patients should remember that new investigational treatments are introduced all of the time. These are therapies or medicines that may be effective, even though they are still in the research phases or not approved for widespread use.

http://prostatehealth-101.com/ is a website committed to providing you with the best information regarding prostate cancer. Whether you're searching for the latest prostate cancer treatments, or you're wondering what the common causes and risk factors of prostate cancer are, we've got you covered!

Dealing With Prostate Disease

An enlarged prostate is a natural occurrence in men as they age. One effect of an enlarged prostate is that it will affect the urethra and me to urinary problems. The enlarged prostate squeezes the urethra and obstructs the flow of urine. This is known as benign prosthetic hyperplasia, BPH. The most common effects of BPH are difficulty urinating, and the frequent need to urinate in a time of day, but especially at night.

Some people are not bothered by this prostate disease, they are able to live their lives in a fulfilling matter. Others however find that this disrupts their daily lives to the point where something must be done. Many of these men affected with prostate disease will find that there is blood in their urine, still having the urge to urinate even after finishing, or weak urination. It is not surprising then that these symptoms will make a man worry about his health, and may even affect him mentally.

Prostate cancer may also arise. This prostate disease will affect the man's sexual function. In this case, the man may experience painful ejaculations, and the inability to maintain an erection. In this case, the prostate disease has a severe detriment not only to the man's physical health but also especially to his mental well-being.

Traditionally men view themselves as being sexual aggressor in many situations, any upside to this delicate balance of the male ego will result in severe mental anguish. Unfortunately, prostate disease has this potential. Prostate diseases especially harmful to the man who is unable to cope with sexual dysfunctions.

There are many treatments available for prostate disease in any of its forms be at prostate cancer, or BPH. The key to success is having the prostate disease discovered diagnosed and treated early. The sooner the better. Success is much more likely when the prostate disease is caught in its infancy.

An important tool in fighting prostate disease is maintaining a prostate healthy diet. Leafy green vegetables and fruits rich with antioxidants are both good choices. There is evidence to suggest that taking vitamins and supplements with vitamin E, saw Palmetto, and selenium are important for maintaining prostate health.

Maintaining a healthy lifestyle to avoid prostate disease also includes proper exercise regimens. Daily cardiovascular exercise will not only pay off in the long run with other health benefits, but it will also help maintain a healthy prostate.

Prostate disease can be controlled through early detection and treatment. It is best to take a holistic approach to treating prostate disease. Work with your doctor to discuss the best course of treatments, as well as start making positive changes in your eating and exercise habits. Maintaining a healthy prostate will not only add years to your life, but it will also significantly increase the quality of your life.

You can also find more info on Prostate Exam and Laser Prostate Treatment . Prostatecancertreatmenthelp.com is a comprehensive resource to know more about prostate cancer treatment.