Prostate Cancer Therapy: Your Options for Treating Prostate Cancer
Men have walnut-shaped glands that produce the semen and the fluid that aids in the safe transport of the semen into the female organ. In the United States, one out of 6 men will develop cancer, which could be life threatening. Prostate cancer therapy is needed to treat this disease and there are several of these therapies that can slow down the cancer growth or eliminate the cancer cells.
Radiation therapy is one method to treat prostate cancer and it can be delivered in two ways - External Beam Radiation Therapy (EBRT) or Brachytherapy.
EBRT is a prostate cancer therapy that uses an x-ray machine to emit radiation to the affected cells. It is given weekly for 5 days within a 7- or 8-week period. This could eat up a lot of time but its advantage is that it doesn’t require the person to have anesthesia. It is a totally painless procedure. One session will take about 10 minutes. The actual beaming only takes about a minute to finish. Most of the time is spent for the preparations.
The downside of this method is that other healthier cells could get beamed too, if the procedure is not done properly and carefully. There are mild side effects, which usually fade away after a short period.
Brachytherapy or seed therapy is a prostate cancer therapy that uses radioactive pellets or seeds about the same size as rice grains. About 40 to 100 of these seeds are injected into the prostate gland of the patient under general anesthesia. It takes about 2 hours to complete the procedure. This can be done in one hospital visit only compared to the number of sessions required by EBRT. High doses of radiation are emitted directly on the cancer cell via the pellets. These can affect those within a few millimeters of their location in the prostate gland.
The radioactive seeds may contain iodine and palladium. There is really no need to take them out after their radiation has been used up (which is usually within one year). The radiation won’t escape the patient’s body in harmful doses, but it is still recommended that these patients stay 6 feet away from children and pregnant women during the first few months after the injection of the pellets. Expect some discomfort caused by seed therapy.
Another prostate cancer therapy is called hormone therapy. This one stops the male human body from creating testosterone. This is the male sex hormone that can affect the growth of cancer cells and increase them. This method also hedges the testosterone hormones and prevents their entry to the affected cells.
This is effective in shrinking the cancer and slowing down their growth, especially in patients who are already in the advanced stages. For patients who are still in the early stages, this prostate cancer therapy is sometimes used to shrink the cells before the doctor exposes the patient to radiation therapy or surgery.
The downside of hormone therapy as a prostate cancer therapy is that controlling testosterone doesn’t always eliminate the cancer cells. After some time, these cancer cells will adopt and continue to thrive even without the hormones.
