When your doctor suspects you may have prostate cancer, what comes next is a careful series of tests and examinations that will confirm the diagnosis and assess the extent of the disease. Most prostate cancer cases are highly treatable, but first, your care team needs to know exactly what you’re dealing with. Read on to learn more about the process of diagnosis and staging of prostate cancer.
Screening and Early Detection
Prostate cancer often has no symptoms until the disease is advanced, and screening may help detect cancer early, when the chances of treatment success are high. But there is no one-size-fits-all approach to prostate cancer screening. When should you start screening? First, talk to your ...
How is Prostate Cancer Diagnosed?
Diagnosis of Prostate Cancer When a PSA test or a digital rectal exam (DRE) reveals abnormal results, the next step is further testing to determine whether prostate cancer is present, or if there is another, benign (non-cancer) explanation. Your doctor will evaluate your test results ...
Prostate Cancer Staging
What’s My “Stage”? A cancer’s stage is an assessment that takes into account a variety of factors: the cancer’s location, whether it has spread, or metastasized, and how much it’s interfering with normal body processes. Generally, the stage of a person’s cancer is correlated with their ...
Gleason Score and Grade Group
Grading Your Cancer One important component of staging your cancer is the grade of the cancer. While the stage of your cancer looks at where the cancer is present in your body (how it is behaving at the macro level), the grade describes what the actual cancer cells ...
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Newly Diagnosed
Dealing with a Diagnosis When your doctor suspects you may have prostate cancer, they will order more tests, which may include: A repeat test of the level of PSA in your blood A digital rectal exam, or DRE An ultrasound An MRI, or magnetic resonance imaging ...
Prostate Cancer Metastases
What is Metastatic Prostate Cancer? Sometimes cancer cells will escape the prostate and grow quickly, spreading to nearby tissue, or “metastasizing”. Nearby lymph nodes are often the first destination for a spreading cancer. If prostate cancer has spread to your lymph nodes when it is diagnosed, ...
PSA Rising
When prostate cancer is caught in its earliest stages, initial therapy can lead to a high chance for a cure, with most men living cancer-free for many years. The cancer cells have either been removed with surgery or killed with radiation. But some prostate cancer cells ...
Advanced Prostate Cancer
Advanced disease refers to prostate cancer that has spread beyond the prostate and is unlikely to be cured with surgery or radiation alone. https://vimeo.com/733684541/108f4ea017 Men diagnosed with metastatic prostate cancer (their disease has already spread beyond the prostate by the time of diagnosis), will often not ...
Janet Farrar Worthington
Biopsy: Things You Need to Know
The first thing you should know is that there’s still plenty of room for confusion ...
Janet Farrar Worthington
What Stage is My Prostate Cancer?
When doctors talk about prostate cancer, they use something called the TNM system. The “T” ...