There has been a recent discovery of a way to tell the difference between prostate cancer in a man which will grow slowly and will behave in a sleepy and quiet manner from prostate cancer in a man which will grow very quickly and powerfully and will kill the man if it is not treated immediately and aggressively. This is exciting news! Men have dearly needed to know how to be able to make this distinction for years!
Prostate cancer is a very frequent form of cancer. The key, however, is that for most men prostate cancer is something that they die WITH and not die FROM. What this means is that for most men, prostate cancer is a process that affects them but it is one which they can live with for years and at the end of their lives, they die from other causes (such as a heart attack or heart failure) and not from the prostate cancer that they have been carrying for years.
But what of the men in whom the prostate cancer is not so slow growing? What of the men in whom the prostate cancer grows very aggressively? How can we tell the difference between the prostate cancers in men which will remain sleepy and quiet for years (and for possibly the rest of their lives) from the prostate cancers in men which will grow terribly fast and be deadly if not treated aggressively and immediately?
Well, doctors at the Institute for Cancer Research at the Royal Marsden Foundation in Surrey, UK have recently shown, in an article published on January 26th, 2010 in the British Journal of Cancer that there are genes that may indeed be able to help us make this critical distinction between these two groups of prostate cancers in men.
Doctors AHM Reid and colleagues have identified a combination of genes that if present in a man with prostate cancer, indicate that that man has a much more aggressive and lethal form of prostate cancer. Equally important is the information that if a man has prostate cancer does NOT have these gene changes, he may very likely have a very slow growing and much less deadly form of prostate cancer.
The genes that these doctors have identified are called the PTEN gene and the ERG/ETV1 gene rearrangement. Drs. Reid and colleagues demonstrated that if a man with prostate cancer has the PTEN gene AND the ERG/ETV1 gene rearrangement in his prostate cancer, his cancer will grow much faster and much more aggressively. On the other hand, if a man with prostate cancer does NOT have the PTEN and ERG/ETV1 gene rearrangements, his prostate cancer will grow very slowly and will be much less lethal.
Indeed, these researchers have shown that 85% of men with prostate cancers which DID NOT have the PTEN gene and the ERG/ETV1 gene rearrangement were alive 11 years after the finding of their prostate cancer. By comparison, ONLY approximately 14% of the men who had prostate cancers which DID have the PTEN gene and the ERG/ETV1 gene rearrangements were alive at 11 years after the finding of their cancers.
All of the above concepts and information and much more are available in very easy to understand language in the Prostate Cancer audio CD available on www.CancerInPlainEnglish.com