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Revealed! Latest Treatment On Prostrate Cancer

But Do the Latest Prostate Cancer Treatment
Options Work Better Than Traditional Methods?

You hear the words "prostate cancer" and your heart sinks. After regaining your composure your mind starts to race wondering what the best next move is. You know the one that will give you the best odds of beating this thing. For many, however, there is no clear cut answer. Just many choices.

Typically guidelines regarding treatment for the prostrate cancer vary with grade and severity of the cancer.

Which alternative is best also depends on your age.

Finally there are different choices depending on whether yours is an early and advanced stage of cancer.

Plus which of the newer methods might give you a best odds of survival with fewest side affects?

Simply put there are a lot of treatment options. That also implies there is no one size fits all choice here. And that holds true with both traditional and the latest treatment on prostate cancer options as well. Be that hormone therapy, chemotherapy, or surgery.

But with the advances, the latest treatments offer many two things. Those would be better odds of a better outcome with fewer treatment induced "quality of life" complications.

It's true that the downsides of treatments like surgery or radiation therapy have always been a high likelihood of incompetence and impotence. As surgery can slice and dice muscles and nerves you'd rather not be cut. While radiation kills the same tissue only as collateral damage.

But like I said advances have been made. So on the list of cutting edge technology you would include five options

robotic surgery
improved radiation therapy
cryosurgery
proton beam therapy
HIFU

Robotics
The nerve-sparing, minimally invasive, robotic laparoscopic surgery option is known as da Vinci. Sitting at a work station that looks like it came from the set of Star Wars, the surgeon makes five small abdominal incisions starting from navel level on down. Through these tiny surgical instruments and a camera (that provides a live video feed from inside the body) are inserted. Aside from the benefit of laparocsopic, the console allows the surgeon to enlarge the video image they are seeing so that they are less apt to cut and cauterize nerve tissue better left uncut and preserved. At least in theory. This also lets the surgeon better finesse small movements to remove your prostate.

Improved Radiation Therapy
Today's radiation therapies offer better results with fewer side affects and post op complications. One of the newer techniques (intensity modulated radiation) allows delivery of a much higher dose of radiation too. This produces a higher cure rate. By taking advantage of improved imaging ultrasounds and computers, the radiation beam can be precisely targeted within a millimeter of the objective. Minimizing damage to the bladder and rectum - two common problems with traditional radiation therapy.

Or there is the internal radiation therapy called brachytherapy. This involves radioactive impants that are inserted directly into the prostate. Again the idea here is minimal collateral damage to surrounding tissue.

Cryosurgery
Again with the help of ultrasound imaging, the surgeon uses probes to circulate liquid nitrogen or argon gas to freeze the cancer in your prostate.

Proton Beam Therapy
This is a unique radiation delivery system that very precisely shoots fast-moving subatomic particles into tumors. It's felt to be superior as subatomic particles unleash most of their destructive energy under the skin, or at tumor depth, as opposed to near the surface. Beyond that, the claim to fame of this approach lies in its ability to spare surrounding healthy tissue while destroying cancerous cells. That better targeting means surgeons can amp up the amount of radiation in the dosage giving improved cure rates.

HIFU
A treatment option to watch is HIFU or high-intensity focused ultrasound. While it's yet to be approved for use in the United States, this technique uses ultrasound waves to heat up and destroy cancerous prostate tissue. It's been described as a way to melt tumors. So far where available it is producing cure rates on a par with surgery and radiation - with fewer quality of life side effects. But for now you would need to travel outside the US to get this treatment.

With any of these you want to consider two things. The effectiveness of the technique itself plus the skill of the person performing the procedure. Usually the more experienced the surgeon the more likely it is you'll get a good outcome.

Also with some of these approaches not enough is yet known to say for sure they are offer true improvement over traditional therapies in getting rid of cancer. Some may be more evolutionary rather than revolutionary in that regard. Yet it still pays to keep abreast of the latest developments, don't you think?