WHO GETS PROSTATE CANCER?
First, a few sobering truths: Every three minutes, a new case of prostate cancer is diagnosed in the United States. Every fifteen minutes, a man dies from it. And there’s no gende way to describe what this death is like. For too many men, death from prostate cancer is a sad end to months of excruciating pain, increasingly thin and brittle, cancer-riddled bones, awful constipation from pain-killing drugs, and miserable symptoms of urinary obstruction.
In 1994, an estimated two hundred thousand men were diagnosed with prostate cancer, and thirty-eight thousand men died because of it—about one out of every five men who developed the disease. And the numbers are getting worse. As the death rate from other illnesses is decreasing, the death rate from prostate cancer is on the rise—over the last five years, it has increased by as much as 3 percent a year. By the year 2000, the incidence of prostate cancer is expected to increase by 90 percent; prostate cancer deaths are expected to go up by 37 percent. A boy born today has a 13 percent chance of developing prostate cancer, and a 3 percent chance of dying from it. Except for skin cancer, prostate cancer is the most common cancer in men.
Hormones are one big factor in the development of the disease, although their role is not fully understood. Men who are castrated or who have pituitary failure—in which the brain no longer stimulates the testes to function—before age 40 rarely develop prostate cancer.
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