IDing Which of the 24 Types of PCa You Have

Some 218,000 American men will be diagnosed with prostate cancer this year.
An estimated 85% of those
tumors will grow so slowly that they will never cause problems. But the rest
are aggressive and lethal. As of now,
there's no way to tell early on which cancers are which, so tens of
thousands of men undergo surgery or radiation
each year for cancers that never needed treatment, risking impotence or
incontinence in the process.
Several recent genetic discoveries could help doctors evaluate how
aggressive a man's prostate cancer is much
earlier. Scientists at the University of Michigan have identified at least
24 different kinds of prostate cancer of
varying virulence whose DNA signatures can be read like a bar code. Memorial
Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center
researchers have identified other genetic subtypes of prostate cancer that
seem to predict whether the tumor will
be low or high risk. And Harvard Medical School scientists have found a
specific gene that causes prostate
cancers to spread. Some of the discoveries also could lead to new
treatments, tailored specifically for the kind of
prostate tumor a man has.

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