Prostate cancer
21 Jul
Prostate cancer is a malignant tumor that arises in the prostate gland. As with any cancer, if it is advanced or left untreated in early stages, it can eventually spread through the blood and lymph fluid to other organs. Fortunately, prostate cancer tends to be slow growing compared to other cancers. As many as 90% of all prostate cancers remain dormant and clinically unimportant for decades. This high incidence of latent or incidental malignancy is unique to the prostate gland. Most older men eventually develop at least microscopic evidence of prostate cancer, but it often grows so slowly that, as one specialist has written, many men with prostate cancer “die with it, rather than from it.”
Prostate cancer is the most common male cancer in the U.S. Only lung cancer causes more cancer deaths in American men. The lifetime probability of developing prostate cancer is about 16%. Each year, about 187,000 men in the United States are diagnosed with prostate cancer, and about 29,000 die from the disease. According to the American Cancer Society, 5-year survival rates for all stages of prostate cancer have increased during the past 20 years from 67% to nearly 100%.[take from lifespan.org]
