Prostate cancer
How will my treatment be determined? Your treatment will depend on the staging of your cancer and risk assessment.
Staging Staging of the cancer is used to describe its size and position and whether it has spread from where it started. To gather this information, your doctor may wish to carry out an MRI scan, a positron emission tomography (PET) scan, a computed tomography (CT) scan, pelvic node dissection and/or a bone scan (Parker et al., 2015). • MRI scan: MRI uses magnetic fields and radio waves to produce detailed images of the inside of your body. • PET scan: PET uses a radioactive substance injected into a vein and can help find areas of cancer that an MRI or CT scan may miss. Most PET scans are now performed along with a CT scan. • CT scan: This is a type of x-ray technique that lets doctors see your internal organs in cross-section. • Pelvic node dissection: This is a procedure to remove pelvic lymph nodes to check if they contain cancerous cells. • Bone scan: This is a scan to look for bone metastases and involves a small amount of radioactive substance injected into a vein to allow doctors to see abnormal areas of bone across your whole body, as abnormal bone absorbs more radioactivity than healthy bone.
After diagnosis, imaging scans can show how far advanced the prostate cancer is
Staging to determine the size and spread of the cancer is described using a sequence of letters and numbers. For prostate cancer, there are four stages designated with Roman numerals I to IV. Generally, the lower the stage, the better the outcome (or prognosis) for the patient. The TNM staging system considers: • How big the cancer is, or tumour size (T). • Whether the cancer has spread to lymph nodes (N). • Whether it has spread to distant sites, or metastases (M).
Staging helps to determine the most appropriate treatment for prostate cancer
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