This week, Bobbi Conner talks with Dr. Eric Wallen about prostate cancer treatment. Dr. Wallen is a Professor and Chair of the Urology Department at MUSC.
TRANSCRIPT:
Conner: I'm Bobbi Conner for South Carolina Public Radio with Health Focus here at the radio studio for the Medical University of South Carolina in Charleston. Approximately 80% to 85% of all prostate cancers are detected in the early stages. Doctor Eric Wallen is here to talk about treatment of prostate cancer. Doctor Wallen is a Professor and Chair of the Urology Department at MUSC. Doctor Wallen, first of all, why is prostate cancer screening so important and beneficial to the patient?
Dr. Wallen: The reason why is that when prostate cancer is at its most treatable phase or stage, that patients typically have no symptoms whatsoever. The time that we want to identify cancers, particularly whether or not they're dangerous, is when patients have no symptoms whatsoever.
Conner: When someone is diagnosed with prostate cancer, what additional tests might be done to gain more details about the extent of cancer.
Dr. Wallen: We usually will do additional scans to check for the spread of prostate cancer. Those are called staging studies. Those might include CT scan or an MRI, or a bone scan or a PET scan.
Conner: And how is prostate cancer treated?
Dr. Wallen: When the prostate cancer is only in the prostate and hasn't spread elsewhere, the standard of care treatments are surgery, radiation, or monitoring, which is called active surveillance. Prostate cancer is slow, so simple monitoring will work for many patients.
Conner: And how do you counsel your patients about these various treatment options?
Dr. Wallen: First of all, it's important to have a sense of the patient's overall health because prostate cancer usually doesn't hurt people or kill people for at least ten years. If they have that amount of life ahead of them or more, we talk about things that can happen with these treatments, such as side effects, and we talk about what things are of most value to them related to their cancer and the side effects of treatment.
Conner: And why might a patient do active monitoring instead of a different treatment?
Dr. Wallen: The less aggressive forms of prostate cancer are so slow that they probably will never impact a patient's life. My job is to make sure that we're monitoring it, to make sure that that is the case. So, we'll be safely doing that over time without abandoning the opportunity to treat the prostate cancer should a more aggressive kind of prostate cancer be identified down the line?
Conner: What are some of the latest advances in treating prostate cancer?
Dr. Wallen: Over the years, we've developed several techniques to decrease the rates of sexual dysfunction and urinary leakage after surgery. There's new treatments where we treat just the tumor itself, which is called focal therapy, and we're doing that here at MUSC.
Conner: Tell us about treating prostate cancer that doesn't actually go away or that comes back after treatment.
Dr. Wallen: Some of the more aggressive prostate cancers aren't cured by that first line treatment only. And we have several additional types of treatment that we can use for those patients. In fact, about 1 in 4 patients experiences what we call a recurrence of prostate cancer. And we have several tools in our toolkit to address that, so the patients can live for many, many more years.
Conner: Doctor Wallen, thanks for this information about prostate cancer treatment.
Dr. Wallen: Pleasure being with you today, Bobbi.
Conner: From the radio studio for the Medical University of South Carolina in Charleston, I'm Bobbi Conner for South Carolina Public Radio.
Health Focus transcripts are intended to accurately represent the original audio version of the program; however, some discrepancies or inaccuracies may exist. The audio format serves as the official record of Health Focus programming.
