What is your age? How is your overall health? These are important data points for sharing ideas. Stay positive.

I will be 70 years of age next month and my overall health is excellent...

I have read in some prostrate cancer books that some doctors believe that Gleason 6 will probably not spread and will not kill you and should not even be called a cancer. I think considering your age and this gleason score that you should seriously consider active observation, subject to the advise of your doctors at an excellent cancer facility. Good luck

I have been diagnosed @ 2 months ago with 3+3=6 . Having surgery June 26. Father had prostate removed at 52 years old , I am turning 59 in 2 day. It is a life changing decision but I feel good about it. My decipher test just came back as high risk. I have a very experienced surgeon whom was recommended by a friend that had prostate surgery and highly recommend dr. Cancer is contained to prostate according to 3t mri. Scared at the thought of the risk of incontinace and ed but all will ok .

TY all for your input and I will consider my options. It's refreshing to hear from those who have experienced what I am going thru now. Good luck to all if you and God bless....

Given what I've read here, I'd get a couple more PSA tests (at least one) before I made any decision as there are quite a few things that can have an effect on that. Minimally, I'd wait 3 mos and test again, perhaps your PSA will go down a little which might indicate surveillance to be a good option at this time.

Have a couple friends that were 6's and both elected to do radiation, I'm not sure of the exact type but they were 39ish treatments and haven't had to have any other treatments and both are 10 years plus.

I sort of feel an obligation to respond to this for honesty sake "After killing the cancer cells what guarantee is there that there will be a few living cells left that will grow at a later date???" Such a guarantee will never come. I think you likely need to brace yourself for this realization. Someone put an appropriate quote on here, "You can be cancer free, but, you'll never be free from cancer" (paraphrased)

I was gleason 7 and elected for surgery, the doctor was giving me high fives after the second follow up telling me we got it all, a year later I was in salvage radiation treatment.

Every case is a little bit different. In comparison to many of our brothers here, you are in a pretty good position, but it's not like an appendix removal. You'll have to be monitoring this for the duration.

Best of Luck to you whatever you decide!

Bolovino: I had 3+4 = 7 Gleason. My PSA was 10.2 and monitoring was given to me by one of my radiation oncologist that I spoke to, as was radiation and adt by another, and radiation only by the others. I would suggest you use your biopsy material to get a Decipher test. Doctors do use it. It takes a couple of weeks to get the results back and may give you a feel for the nature of its aggressiveness.

I did not feel comfortable having a cancer growth inside of me as I could not judge the risk of how quickly something like that could grow even though I took the decipher test. I knew I would be thinking about further problems regarding treatments and side effects if I did not take action. Also, I wanted to avoid chemotherapy and hormone therapy, if possible.

I did my research on prostate removal or radiation. I looked at the different types of radiation machines and narrowed it down to either Mevion’s Proton Therapy or viewray Mridian’s photon radiation therapy. I spoke with five radiation oncologist from four centers of excellence. I chose the viewray mridian (viewray.com). My focus was on minimizing exposure to healthy tissue so that my side effects would be as little as possible.

Unlike Proton and other radiation machines, the Mridian was using 2 millimeter margins as opposed to all the others that were exposing healthy tissue from 3 to 6 mm. In addition, the Mridian had a built-in MRI so that they were treating my cancer in real time so they could see “it” more effectively versus other methods that involved fusing images together. The Mridian also had an auto turn off feature that shut the Radiation off if your body started to move, internally, or externally, and the radiation in progress wandered to the edge of the Mapped area.

I had the spaceor put in which gave me 1/2 inch of additional space between my rectum and the prostate. I finished my treatment in February of this year, five of them. My PSA has gone from 10.2 to 4.6 a month and a half ago to 2.99 a week ago. I was on Flomax until 2 weeks ago but never had any pain or blood anywhere.

Finally, the discussions in the medical community seem to focus on 10 to 15 years with any of the treatments while touching on the five-year term. My hope was that in the worst case I could get at least five years cancer free and by that time some of the trials going on now related to smart targeting of cancer would provide me with some new solutions.

There is no evidence that true Gleason 6 will ever metastasize. Shouldn’t all people with Gleason 6 go on AS?