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What side effects, if any, did you have with Cyberknife?
Prostate Cancer | Last Active: May 23 11:28am | Replies (35)Comment receiving replies
Thanks so much for your comments.
Basically they said a 7 put you in the treatment protocol vs AS. I had a urologist oncologist consult and he agreed with treatment.
I will ask the urologist and radiologist the benefit for toxicity of the IMRT multiple treatments at a lower dose. I have read they from others also.
I do worry about the all 12 positive. I have not heard of anyone else with 12 of 12. I believe the surgeon said that lessons the chance of nerve sparing.
Replies to "Thanks so much for your comments. Basically they said a 7 put you in the treatment..."
From my reading Gleason 3+4=7 often leads to active surveillance, while 4+3=7 often leads to stronger treatments.
The point is the cutoff for what counts as "cancer" is typically between 3 (possible pre-cancer) and 4 (possible early cancer).
With 3+4, the 3's are still most common, so it's not clear that cancer is developing too seriously yet; with 4+3 you have more cancer than pre-cancer irregular cells, and that means the cancer might be ready to start growing, though it might be very slow.
(Caveat that I'm a layperson, just getting this info from books and articles, and that there are other factors besides Gleason score).
With that very low cancer load you should look into less invasive therapies, such as TulsaPro or MRI guided HIFU.
You only have 5% of the ‘4’ component in your Gleason score so why go all in with radiation? You are so close to AS, yet they are telling you that you have to take this huge leap into treatment.
I had no choice really since my cancer was so extensive - it was EASY to accept life altering treatment. But you are no way in that position!
Educate yourself on these less invasive protocols and reach out to members on the forum who’ve had them. Many had cases worse than yours and were treated successfully without surgery or radiation. Just my thoughts…
Phil
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Yes, according to the NCCN guidelines, a 3+4=7 can put you in the protocol for AS….as long as there are no other risk factors identified:
> PSA
> % Free PSA
> PSA Doubling Time
> PSA Density
> other MRI issues
> other biopsy issues
> biomarker (genomic) test results
> genetic (germline) test results
If they’ll do a PSMA PET scan, that would help in making the AS decision.
Regarding your 11 Gleason 3+3=6s. There’s some debate in the medical community as to whether a G6 should even be called cancer (since a “3” structure cell can’t metastasize) and therefore shouldn’t be considered as a G7+. (That a 6(3+3) is a harmless benign tumor - that it shouldn’t necessarily be treated.) With a Gleason 6, they’ll usually recommend active surveillance, unless you have other known risk factors.
As for nerve-sparing as a treatment consideration, surgery ranked dead last in my choices when I was considering quality-of-life being equal priority with success.