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Let's talk about some of the new treatments that are coming down the pike in prostate
cancer.
The kind of the time on a treatment for prostate cancer has been, we call radical prostatectomy
and that's removing the prostate. That actually dates back to the early 1900s and then radiation
was introduced, they treat prostate cancer, you know decades later and both of these techniques
have been refined a lot, radiation and surgery, what else is there. Freezing cryotherapy,
that has been around for a long time to treat cancers, you know usually they treat skin
cancers and what people used to do is that deliver liquid nitrogen through tubes to the
prostate and you could freeze it. That was kind of really early treatments with a lot
of side effects and kind of barbaric in way and now what you can do is you can put in
small probes, the size of soda straws or smaller than that actually, you know big needles and
you can circulate argon gas through it and then when the gas expands through an opening,
it freezes and even get down to negative 70 and negative 80 centigrade, and if you get
down to the negative 40 or negative 20 twice, you can kill almost any cell basically and
so it is just a matter of putting these probes in the prostate, monitoring them, and using
ultrasound to look at it. It works very well, it is outpatient, it is simple and you can
also have heaters too so that you can protect nerves with, by putting helium through these
and helium when it expands, it heats, so we got heat coolers and heaters and that is actually
a good way to treat a lot of prostate cancers in men that have failed radiation. It just
has not caught on in the United States that there was a lot of controversy earlier on
with it. Another new exciting way is to use a high intensity focused ultrasound, so if
you take a magnifying lens and you look at the sun in a piece of paper, you burn a hole,
so if you focus ultrasound in the prostate, you can do the same thing. And you do it through
transrectally, you just go through and you just kind of paint the prostate, starting
up at the top. The limitations are size of the prostate, you can't do with prostates
and so forth and you can damage the urethra and that so, studies ongoing with that. There
are also ways to actually produce electricity in the prostate and ablate this with electroporation
and that's some exciting things, so there is whole bunch of other things out there beside
surgery and radiation that are coming down the pike.
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 prostrate 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.