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Half of Prostate Cancer Focal Therapy Cases Were Inappropriate
Prostate Cancer | Last Active: Aug 22 2:07pm | Replies (29)Comment receiving replies
Yeah, at the time I was convinced that I had no metastasis with all the negative results of preliminary testing. I do wonder if perhaps the first PSMA wasn't performed properly. I have read where the PSMA pet scans are about 85% accurate.
Replies to "Yeah, at the time I was convinced that I had no metastasis with all the negative..."
@swl1956 Probably much less than that since it cannot detect anything smaller than 2mms in diameter.
On a ruler, that’s not very big but microscopically it is enormous and very capable of causing recurrence.
Nothing was done wrong by the doctors…
Further, nothing was done wrong by you; you made an educated choice based on the evidence you were presented and it turned out that some evidence was missing. That’s it.
Phil
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@swl1956 @surftohealth88 Just so. I believe a micrometastasis needs to reach millions of cells before even PSMA-PET can detect it. And for that matter, needle biopsies are almost literally needles in haystacks — if they tell you that your Gleason score is 4+3 for example, that's just the highest they found in their samples. They might have narrowly missed a spot with Gleason 8 or 9 too small to register on the MRI.
There is no way at all to know for sure what's happening with prostate cancer. We're just taking samples, making scans, and playing odds.
That's why I (personally) have been happy to err a bit on the side of overtreatment, to tilt the odds more in my favour with stage 4 PCa: I'd rather live *with* some uncomfortable side-effects than die *without* them. YMMV.