Prostate cancer treatment selection criteria

The treatments for prostate cancer mainly include surgery, radiotherapy and chemotherapy. Each treatment method has a standard and should be carefully selected based on the patient's constitution and the characteristics of the disease.

Surgery

There are two factors to consider when considering surgical treatment. One is the age of the patient. Surgery is only meaningful for patients with a life expectancy of more than 10 years. Therefore, it is generally not recommended for prostate cancer patients over 75 years old. The other is the degree of differentiation of cancer cells. Patients with well-differentiated or moderately differentiated prostate cancer can consider radical surgery, while patients with poorly differentiated prostate cancer are not suitable.

Radiation therapy

Radiotherapy can relieve local pain of bone metastasis and reduce the development of lesions to a certain extent. The main methods include external radiotherapy, intratissue radiotherapy and whole-body radiotherapy. The survival time of prostate cancer patients after receiving radiotherapy is not affected by age, so radiotherapy has no age limit. It is generally suitable for patients with localized prostate cancer or residual cancer after surgery. Radiotherapy can normalize the tissue structure and improve the patient's quality of life.

Chemotherapy

Chemotherapy is mostly used to prevent cancer recurrence after surgery or when the disease deteriorates rapidly and requires emergency control. Its purpose is to control the reproduction of cancer cells by directly killing cancer cells and increasing the level of white blood cells in the blood in a stress-induced manner. However, chemotherapy can also cause damage to some normal functions of the human body, especially inhibiting the hematopoietic function of bone marrow white blood cells. Therefore, patients should not think that chemotherapy is a panacea and should do it scientifically.