There are two key ways to suffer regret over prostate
cancer, I think.
The first is that a man can choose to do nothing
interventionist about his cancer but just sit and wait and takes what comes,
and if the cancer goes on to spread, then clearly, that man will have regretted
not choosing a more active form of treatment.
The second way, however, is precisely the opposite form of
regret, that is, regret from having chosen to follow some kind of intervention
for the prostate cancer, since so many of these cancers do not go on to spread
yet the interventionist therapies are all linked to important potential
complications.
An interesting study just published in the urology
journal BJUI International followed
795 men with recurrent prostate cancer, that is men who had chosen to have
therapy but in whom the cancer had recurred anyway.
These included men who had had surgery,
men who had chosen external beam radiation therapy, men who got brachytherapy
(internal radiation), and a few men who got hormone therapy.
Roughly one/third of all the
men had known heart problems.
Here’s the interesting thing:
over 15 % of the men regretted their decision to have therapy, this in spite of
the fact that they knew they had an aggressive cancer that had recurred, and
men with heart disease were 52 % more likely to suffer such regret than were
men without heart problems.
Why would they have regretted
their decision?
Because every form of prostate
cancer therapy not only raises the risk of severe complications such as incontinence
and impotence, but equally important, especially for men in whom the likelihood
of the cancer killing them is lower than they likelihood that they’ll die of
something else, every form of prostate cancer therapy has a negative impact on
quality of life, and if you’re a man with prostate cancer and you’ve only got
an estimated 5-10 years of life left, that should play a very large role in
whatever decision you make about prostate cancer.
