← Return to Survivor guilt (?)

Discussion
northoftheborder avatar

Survivor guilt (?)

Prostate Cancer | Last Active: 21 hours ago | Replies (45)

Comment receiving replies
Profile picture for northoftheborder @northoftheborder

That's a great spreadsheet, but it combines all prostate cancer cases into a single bucket.

The challenge with PCa is that the vast majority of cases are slow moving (cancers can you die "with" instead of "of"). However, the aggressive minority can be *very* aggressive. If you already know you have the aggressive variety (e.g. it has metastasised or has a Gleason score of 8 or 9) then you're in a different cohort, and that 11.79% no longer applies to you.

The good news (yes, there is good news) is that that's not a death sentence either, like it often was a decade ago. With new treatments like the -lutamides, doublet/triplet therapy, etc., we may actually get the death rate from advanced cancer down to below 12% too in the near future as well. Fingers crossed.

Jump to this post


Replies to "That's a great spreadsheet, but it combines all prostate cancer cases into a single bucket. The..."

Yes - That’s the reason why early and annual PSA screening, and early detection is so important. I doubt if there are all that many aggressive, metastatic, Gleason score 8/9 prostate cancers at 45y/o.

No doubt there is “early” and “advanced” disease in most of those other cancer types as well. (My brother already had advanced pancreatic cancer when it was detected. They gave him up to a year to live; he didn’t last 3 months.)