Prostate Cancer

As we grow older, our risk of developing serious health issues, including cancer, also grows. For men, the risk of getting prostate cancer increases with age. Prostate cancer is rare in men under 40, and about 60% of cases are diagnosed in men aged 65 or older.

If your medical team determines that your prostate cancer has become aggressive and needs to be treated, an operation called radical prostatectomy — removal of the prostate — is typically the first-line treatment.

With the popularity of mail-away DNA tests and ancestry reports, people are learning more about what makes them who they are. Learning about your family history can be exciting, but this trend also has people curious about the health risks they may have inherited through family genetics.

You ask the internet a lot of questions, and Roswell Park has some answers. James Mohler, MD, Professor of Oncology, and Chair of the NCCN Prostate Cancer Guideline Committee, and Eric Kauffman, MD, Assistant Professor of Oncology, sat down to answer some of the internet's most-searched-for questions related to prostate cancer.

As many as 50% of men over age 50 have prostate cancer. But, the majority of prostate cancers are found to be an unaggressive form of the disease.

Recognizing signs and symptoms of illness is always a good idea, but when it comes to cancer, and especially prostate cancer, symptoms are often vague, difficult to discern from normal, or don’t appear at all until the cancer advances.

Every April, Roswell Park Comprehensive Cancer Center works to raise awareness about cancer among minority populations by recognizing National Minority Cancer Awareness Week, celebrated this year April 8-14, 2019.

It was 2005, and 47-year-old Rick Crowley had a lump growing in his neck. The first biopsy indicated that it was benign, but his doctors in Olean, New York, were not convinced. A good thing, too: The second biopsy found cancer.

All families have their traditions. In ours, we tend to have big families, with numerous siblings – and a lot of cancer. My father was diagnosed with cancer when he was 44 years old.

The fact that you live in a particular country or community should not impact your ability to get good care for cancer.

About 70 percent of men receive their diagnosis when the disease is in its early stages. In most of those cases, the cancer tends to grow slowly and will never cause symptoms or lead to death.

Dr. Gurkamal Chatta and his colleagues are conducting a phase I clinical trial of an immunotherapy for men with metastatic prostate cancer that has progressed in spite of standard treatment. “We are targeting an area of need where there are really no other effective therapies.”