I am looking at his results and it says he has a PSA at 9.7. Also his gleason score is 3+3=6/10. What does that mean? I am very worried about my dad. Any experiences to share?
Cancer - 5 Answers
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1 :
My Grandpa was diagnosed with prostate cancer and his PSA was around the same as your Dad's. He opted to do radiation treatments as well as some sort of hormone therapy injections at the same time. He did the treatments for a year and his PSA levels are now negative. Your Dad will need to discuss treatment options depending on if the cancer is still isolated or if it has spread to other parts of his body. They'll do more tests in the days to come. Medicine has advanced really far and there are a lot of things they can do if the cancer was caught early enough. One thing that my Grandpa did was started eating healthy to help his immune system and drink Acai juice on a daily basis, which is extremely high in antioxidants and helps rid the body of free-radicals and other bad things. I highly recommend it...it helped him feel better throughout his times of treatments. I hope that your Dad gets well soon!
2 :
Don't worry. Just pray to god. Prostate cancer can be cured.
3 :
I am 62. Got diagnosed with PC last july. My PSA was 5.8 and my gleason was 3+3. I had radioactive seed implants and I'm glad I did. I'm feeling fine with very limited side effects. My PSA numbers have dropped substantially and all is well.
4 :
3+3 is about as good as it gets with a Gleason score. Most pathologists these days would not consider anything under 6 to even be cancer. And a PSA of 9.7 isn't that terrible either. What you hate to see is Gleason 9 or 10 and PSA over 20. Then you're in deep trouble. If you also know his clinical stage, which would be something like T2b, T2c, etc. then you can use online calculators at Memorial Sloan Kettering cancer center and other sites to estimate his chances of a cure with prostatectomy or radiation. For the MSK calculator you will also need to know how many cores from the biopsy were positive for cancer. See "How to Estimate Your Prostate Cancer Cure Odds" at http://www.ehow.com/how_5275952_estimate-prostate-cancer-cure-odds.html for more on these tools. These days, a lot men get diagnosed with prostate-confined disease, and the cure rate (yes, CURE rate) in such cases is nearly 100%. Getting prostate cancer is fairly common for men. The lifetime chance is about 1 in 6. However, 97% of all men die of something else besides prostate cancer. Even if you get diagnosed with it, your chance of dying from it is only about 1 in 8 overall--and if you catch and treat it early, as is likely to be the case with your dad, it can be just a bump in the road of life. Many, many thousands of men have been diagnosed, cured, and gone on to live their lives in this age of PSA testing. Don't be overly anxious. Your dad is on a path trodden by many, many others before him, who have done just fine. Best wishes.
5 :
In general, this is not as bad as it may look. The PSA level is elevated but not extreme and the Gleason score in in the midrange. The higher the Gleason score, the more nasty the tumor is . A low score indicated a relatively mild cancer; but cancer all the same. You can find out more about the numbers by using the internet rather than having me stumble along with a rambling dissertation. I was diagnosed at age 52 with a PSA of 41 and a Gleason score of 3+4. I had surgery to remove the gland on June 3, 1999. About six to nine months later, my PSA began to climb from undetectable to 0.2 indicating that I still had prostate cancer. Over the next six years, I tried about 40 different nutritional supplements but my PSA kept moving up. Through the Natural Prostate Treatments Yahoo group, I learned about Prostasol, a herbal product, that members were having good experiences with. At that time my PSA had risen to 15 and although no metastatic disease appeared on bone and Prostascint scans, it was obvious that the disease was growing. I decided to try the Prostasol. After about six weeks, I had a routine PSA reading done and my PSA had dropped to 0.3. I thought it was a mistake. Two months later, another reading was taken and my PSA was still 0.3. Two months after that it was 0.1 and that is where it is today. I recently had my 62nd birthday and still have a low PSA. If I stop taking the Prostasol for a few weeks, my PSA will begin to rise indicating that my cancer is still there. This in not a cure but it does seem to arrest the cancer development. There are side effects but they are milder than the prescription drugs and you can take only as mush Prostasol as you need to get PSA to an acceptable range. Prostasol is also known as Quercetin Plus and Prostasolve. Mike S
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