Patient/caregiver was instructed upon management measures for prostate cancer as follows:
Management measures for prostate cancer essentially depend upon various factors, such as, the type of cancer, how rapid the cancer is growing, extent of involvement, sites of cancer spread, individual’s age, other coexisting health conditions, and many others. Management measures include
Hormone treatment:
- Testosterone is a male sex hormone produced by the testicles. Testosterone is believed to feed the prostate cancer cells and help them grow.
- Medications could be prescribed either to reduce the availability of testosterone or block the actions of testosterone.
- This contributes to controlling growth of prostate cancer. Hormone therapy helps to shrink the tumor in size and is usually employed before radiation therapy for cancers that are actively growing, but the cancer is not spread beyond prostate.
- In severe cases, to help bring down the availability of testosterone abruptly, surgical removal of testicles could also be considered.
Immunotherapy:
- Immunity is body’s natural defense against anything foreign and so, the immune cells should be able to attack and kill the cancer cells in individuals with prostate cancer.
- But the cancer cells make some proteins that mask them from the body’s immune cells and thus are protected.
- Immunotherapy involves use of drugs that unmask the cancer cells and help the body’s immune cells identify the cancer cells easily. This unmasking of cancer cells makes them vulnerable to attack by the body’s immune cells and thus are killed.
- Immunotherapy could be employed for actively growing cancers that are spread far beyond prostate with involvement of other organs and for cancers that are poorly responsive to other treatment modalities.
