Can we prevent prostate cancer?
Prostate cancer is the most common cancer in men over 60 years. It is possible to detect prostate cancer early in its evolution. Strictly speaking, we can not prevent the onset of prostate cancer, but it can detect when its size is still very small by regular review. This is the same approach as for women who are advised screening for breast cancer or cervical cancer.
Cancer cells are often present in the prostate, but they do not grow: they say they remain latent. This is so microscopic cancers without danger. Between 50 and 59 years, 1 in 3 men to a microscopic cancer as is the case for 4 in 10 men between 70 and 79 and the proportion is 7 out of 10 men after 79 years. Sometimes, about once every hundred, these tiny cancers evolve very slowly and become true cancers. It is therefore important that you regularly review time to recognize these true cancers.
1. How to detect prostate cancer?
To detect cancer at its appearance, from the age of 50, he must go every year to the doctor for a review of DRE. The doctor inserts his index finger cot covered with Vaseline impregnated into the anus and feeling the prostate with this finger, aided by the other hand placed on his stomach. The medical research with his finger if he receives a hard zone, ie an area of suspected prostate cancer. If this review raises a doubt, take a sample from the area in question is a biopsy. It is then analyzed under a microscope by a laboratory of pathology (the medical specialty that examines body tissue).
But the DRE is insufficient to diagnose all cancers. To see if there in prostate cancer cells that the doctor’s finger could not perceive, it is necessary to make another examination. It is a blood test, which allows to dose a substance called prostate specific antigen, or PSA.