Precise Prognosis for Prostate Cancer

Only about 10 percent of prostate cancer patients whose cancer has not yet escaped the prostate will ever die from the disease, yet physicians treat nearly 100 percent of those diagnosed with prostate cancer because it is impossible to determine which 10 percent will develop life-threatening problems.

This may someday change, thanks to researchers like Wallace McKeehan, Ph.D., director of the Center for Cancer Biology and Nutrition at Texas A&M’s Institute for Biosciences and Technology.

“Better diagnosis will save enormous costs to our medical system,” he concludes. “These costs largely fall on Medicare, since most prostate patients are more than 65 years old.”

“Definitions of cancer are changing,” McKeehan notes, “as new diagnostic procedures can distinguish prostate cancer at the stage where men have just a few cancer cells contained within their prostates that are insufficient to cause symptoms.”

Researchers at the institute are working to discover how and why cancer cells become malignant and leave the prostate. Armed with this knowledge, doctors could then justify immediate treatment of just a few cancer cells, or they could take preventive measures to keep the cancer cells from leaving the prostate and spreading.

McKeehan and Fen Wang, Ph.D., are studying changes in the molecules by which different cells in the prostate communicate with others – either to cause a balanced and healthy two-way dialogue or to cause misunderstanding in the dialogue between cells that lead to malignancy. Changes in these molecules do even more than provide novel diagnostic markers. These changes also become targets of new treatment strategies to develop new anti-cancer drugs and new prevention strategies based on changes in lifestyle and nutrition.

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URL: http://www.tmc.edu/tmcnews/06_01_03/page_19.html