Prostate Cancer: Assessing Your Risks

As men age, the screening tests their doctors ask them to undergo are likely to start adding up fast. From making sure heart disease and diabetes aren’t concerns to checking for prostate cancer, older men may start to feel like pin cushions. Foregoing those prostate exams, however, could prove to be a fatal mistake.

An estimated 220,000 American men are diagnosed with this disease each year. Some 27,000 die from it. In many cases, prostate cancer, when caught early, can be treated effectively. And, believe it or not, in some cases just carefully monitoring the disease on a regular basis may be all that’s required of a patient.

Men will find prostate cancer does have quite a few risk cancers. The biggest, of course, is the simple fact of being a male. The prostate gland is only found in men, so this disease does not strike women. Other risk factors that can enhance a man’s chances of developing the disease include:

• Age – This is a big one for prostate cancer. The average age of diagnosis is about 66. It is very rate for a man younger than 40 to be diagnosed with this disease. Considering the average age of diagnosis, screenings typically begin around the age of 50.
• Ethnicity – While any man can develop prostate cancer, the disease is more common in men of African-American and Caribbean descent. Hispanic and Asian-American men are less likely than non-Hispanic whites to develop the disease.
• Genetics – There are a number of ties between family history and genes and the development of prostate cancer. Men, for example, who have a father or brother diagnosed with the disease are more likely to get it than those who do not.

Prostate cancer strikes an estimated 1 in 7 men. If you are age 50 or older, speak with your healthcare provider about basic screening for this disease. Routine exams can enable the detection of this disease in its earliest – and most treatable – form.

About Author:-

Dr. Echt and his team at the Prostate Seed Institute offer the most highly sophisticated methods of radiation therapy available in the United States, equal to that found in major medical center and academic settings. These include prostate seed implantation, high dose radiation implants, and external beam radiation with image-guided and intensity-modulated (IGRT and IMRT) capabilities.

The Prostate Seed Institute is a non-surgical prostate cancer care center. The founder of the Prostate Seed Institute, Dr. Gregory Echt, is a radiation oncologist who specializes in using radiation to treat cancer.