Advanced Prostate Cancer Treatment Options, Detection and Treatment

Before going for the advanced prostate cancer treatment options, one need to be properly diagnosed and this can be done by blood test, Prostate Specific Antigen (PSA) is targeted in the blood test.

Prostate cancer is the formation of tumor like growth in the prostate gland, Advance Prostate cancer treatment options includes:

Advanced Prostate Cancer Treatment Options:

1. Surgery:It is of the advanced prostate cancer treatment option, here surgically removing the tumor or the whole gland. there are side effects associated with the surgery and cannot be performed for old people and it is dependent on health of the individual.
2. Radiation Therapy / Radio Therapy: Radiation Therapy is another method of advanced prostrate cancer treatment option, here ionizing radiations are used to kill the cancer cells, which grows rapidly and uncontrollably forming tumors.Radiation therapy works by damaging DNA of cancerous cells, ionization causes free radical formation which there by causes the damage of cells. there are problems associated with this treatment becuse even normal cells can get affected by the radiation and can turn into cancerous cells.
   
3. Hormone Therapy: This is also advanced prostate cancer treatment option mainly aims at controlling the hormone (Testosterone)  which is responsible for inducing prostate cancer.Luetinizing hormone antagonist with anti-androgens are used for treatment.
   
4. Chemotherapy: Chemotherapy is also an advanced prostate cancer treatment option,In chemotherapy drugs are used to treat the cancerous cells, here the drug targets actively growing cells. chemotherapy for prostate cancer is done only when the hormone therapy had stopped responding in the individual. chemotherapy will not specifically target prostate tumor cells and it can have effects all over the body (targets actively growing cells) . chemotherapy also has got side effects.The most commonly used chemotherapy drug to treat prostate cancer is docetaxel(Taxotere®). Other drugs that might be used are mitoxantrone,epiribicin,estramustine,paclitaxel.
5. Immuno Therapy / Biological Therapy: It is one of the advanced prostate cancer option, various Immune based strategies are used to treat prostate cancer. Provenge® is an immunotherapy treatment for prostate cancer that harnesses the power of the patient's own immune system to identify and target prostate cancer cells. immuno Therapy helps identifying cancer cells as foreign cells and attacks the cancer cells.

There are certain other treatment options used for prostate cancer those include cryosurgery
References
http://www.macmillan.org.uk
Wikipedia
NCBI
www.cancercentre.com
http://www.medindia.net