Prostate Cancer

Prostate cancer is the most common form of noncutaneous cancer in men in the United States, and the second leading cause of male cancer mortality, accounting for more than 30,000 deaths in 1999 (American Cancer Society). The natural history of this disease is remarkably heterogeneous and, at this time, is not clearly understood. Autopsy studies have shown that approximately one in three men over the age of 50 years has histologic evidence of prostate cancer, with up to 80% of these tumors being microscopic in size or clinically insignificant. Fortunately, only about 3% of men will die from this disease.

Some studies have found that a large proportion of patients diagnosed with clinically localized prostate cancer who did not receive early aggressive treatment still had favorable clinical outcomes and normal life expectancies. Most of these studies included an older population of men as well as a larger proportion of men with low-grade tumors than in a series of men treated for prostate cancer. This disparity between the high prevalence rates for histologic prostate cancer and the relatively low lifetime risk of prostate cancer death highlights the difficulty in distinguishing cancers destined to cause significant illness and premature death from those that will not.

For more information on Prostate Cancer, go to http://www.cancer.gov/cancerinfo/wyntk/prostate

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