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Prostate biopsies are not inherently safe, they often turn out well but when they go
badly, they can be life threatening.
Mark Scholz: Okay, prostate biopsy is a way to find prostate cancer, it is kind of an
intrusive process, it involves laying on your side and people actually put needles through
your ***, through your behind, and they remove small amounts of material and that
is looked at under a microscope and that's how they decide if a man has prostate cancer.
So, is this a safe thing to do, well the *** is a dirty spot and I tell you about 3% of
the time, infections result and men can end up in the hospital sadly and there are rare
cases of people even dying from biopsies. The risk is about 1:1000 and I am not talking
about people doing the job badly, I am talking about when the doctors do everything properly,
give antibiotics and they do everything according to the rules, men can still get infections,
they can still end up in the hospital and rarely even die from biopsy. So, biopsies
are not intrinsically safe now, and there is another risk as well which I cannot address
in detail but there are two types of prostate cancer and one kind is low grade and many
argue that it is better not to not even know about it because it is not dangerous but it
frightens people into unnecessary treatment. So, biopsies usually turn out well, but sometimes
they can have very serious side effects.
Some prostate cancers are high risk, aggressive, and more likely to spread. Others are low
risk, least likely to have bad outcomes. The biopsy says cancer, but current diagnostic
tools provide limited information about how aggressive a man's individual disease is,
so most men decide to treat prostate cancer immediately. Once treated, many men experience
serious long-term side effects like incontinence and *** impotence. Immediate treatment
is not always needed, but right now a man can't be sure if his cancer is the kind that
is likely to require treatment or if he is okay to wait for now. What if there was a
test that could determine how aggressive prostate cancer is. Genomic health is developing a
new test to do just that. By reviewing the underlying biology of the tumor and using
genes from multiple biologic pathways, the test can predict the aggressiveness of prostate
cancer when diagnosed, allowing a man to make a more informed treatment decision with confidence,
taking care of himself with more information and greater peace of mind.