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← Return to The Gray Area of Favorable Intermediate Risk 3+4=7
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The Gray Area of Favorable Intermediate Risk 3+4=7
Prostate Cancer | Last Active: 3 days ago | Replies (35)Comment receiving replies
Thanks for sharing your experiences and thoughts. It seems you and I both had the benefit of starting out with 3+3=6 diagnosis leading to a fairly easy active surveillance recommendation and decision. And both of us eventually moved to 3+4=7, you after 9 years and me after just 10 months, demonstrating that we are all unique.
My medical team spoke a lot about risks and probabilities for an individual patient - risk of spread, risk of re-occurrence, risk of treatment side effects, etc.
Glad you are able to be comfortable with your decisions and enjoy those grandbabies!
Replies to "Thanks for sharing your experiences and thoughts. It seems you and I both had the benefit..."
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Yes, so far my experience has been relatively benign. Having monitored my PSA annually since I was 45y (in 2000), left me comfortable with tracking my PSA regularly during active surveillance, after treatment, and even these days every 4 months.
Risk of spread approaches nil for a “true” 3+3 (https://youtu.be/NV8QHzbgamI?si=H3BXS6BxFl3jI5rw), for those that aren’t “true” 3+3s, continuous monitoring of all of those datapoints mentioned earlier (and possibly more) minimizes that risk.
Even if active surveillance is just for a few months (or a few years), as long as it was done by the numbers and accounting for known risk factors, it was done right.
Good luck!