Overview
Cancer of the prostate is the most commonly diagnosed nonskin neoplasm and the second leading cause of cancer‐related mortality in men in the United States. Considerable advances have been made in screening, diagnosis, and therapy options, particularly in advanced disease, but controversies about the diagnosis and management of prostate cancer, especially in the areas of screening and choice of therapy, continue to evolve. Controversies in advanced disease states have shifted from prognostication to prediction, and current treatment considerations are focused on optimization of sequence or combinations of therapy, determining the role of local control and bone targeting. It is anticipated that addressing these knowledge gaps will lead to an integrated and more effective treatment strategies. Further advances in therapy can be achieved by development of new agents with unique mechanisms of action and rational integration into combination therapies.
Prostate cancer awareness, clinical application of improved biopsy schemes, and advances in imaging combined with the widespread use of prostate‐specific antigen (PSA) have resulted in increased detection of prostate cancer. The evolving use of the serum PSA concentration and its change over time have not been paralleled by studies that tested the relevance of those findings until the results of the European Randomized Study of Screening for Prostate Cancer (ERSPC) and the Prostate, Lung, Colorectal, and Ovarian (PLCO) Cancer Screening Trial were first published in 2009. Though many of the apparent discrepancies between these trials can be accounted for by trial design and patient cross‐contamination, they brought to the forefront the dilemma of overdiagnosis and overtreatment and the urgent need to improve the accuracy of clinically significant prostate cancer. It is hoped that replacement of the current morphologic and anatomic classification of prostate cancer with one based on improved understanding of biology will lead to molecular classification and bring closer a personalized management of this complex disease.
Salient features that distinguish prostate cancer from other malignancies and that frame the dilemmas surrounding it are its striking age‐dependent incidence, with progressively increasing frequency with increasing age; the variable lethality of morphologically identified cancers; the central role of androgen signaling; and the preponderance of bone‐forming metastases on its lethal progression. The important advances made in each of these areas will, in the near future, modify the approaches currently used to prevent, prognosticate, and treat prostate cancer.