Prostate Cancer

Fast Facts | Key Research | More Resources

Prostate Cancer: Fast Facts

• Prostate cancer affects the prostate, a walnut-sized male sex gland located just below the bladder, and occurs most often in men older than 55.
• Most prostate cancers are detected by screening, tend to be small and grow slowly. Chances of survival from most early-stage, low-grade prostate cancers are excellent.
• Prostate-cancer treatment is controversial. Many men with small cancers will not benefit from treatment, because the cancer grows so slowly that it will cause no problems. But it is currently not possible to determine which prostate cancers will grow rapidly, making decisions about when to start treatment and which treatment to use very difficult. 
• Prostate cancer ranks as the most common form of cancer among men in the United States and is second only to lung cancer in the number of annual cancer deaths among U.S. men.

Read more about prostate-cancer prevention, symptoms and treatment options at the Seattle Cancer Care Alliance. »

Prostate Cancer: Some of Our Key Research

Hutchinson Center researchers lead the Seattle-based Program in Prostate Cancer Research, a multidisciplinary team that also includes scientists from the University of Washington, VA Puget Sound, Swedish Hospital, Northwest Prostate Institute, Harborview Medical Center, and the Institute for Systems Biology.
Learn more about the Program in Prostate Cancer Research. »

The Hutchinson Center also leads the Pacific Northwest Prostate Cancer SPORE (short for Specialized Programs of Research Excellence), which focuses on understanding the genetic mechanisms that explain how and why prostate cancer can turn deadly. The National Cancer Institute-funded project also includes researchers from the University of Washington, Oregon Health and Science University and the Prostate Centre at Vancouver General Hospital, an affiliate of the University of British Columbia in Canada. An initial five-year, $12.7 million study began in 2002, but our researchers secured $11.6 million in new funding to continue the project for five more years beginning in September 2007. Learn more about the Pacific Northwest Prostate Cancer SPORE. »

Refining prostate-cancer detection and treatment

• Measuring a man's prostate-specific antigen, or PSA, level is the most common test for early detection of prostate cancer, but studies have shown the method may detect tumors that would never require treatment while failing to find some aggressive cancers.

Dr. Ruth Etzioni and colleagues were among the first to formally evaluate the test's ability to distinguish between true cancers and benign conditions. They have concluded that a variation on the PSA test that uses two types of PSA measurements could improve the test's accuracy for men with borderline-normal total PSA levels, potentially leading to a significant drop in medical costs and complications for this group of men. Learn more about the PSA test research. »

Etzioni and colleagues have also determined that roughly one-third of older men diagnosed with prostate cancer through the PSA test are "overdiagnosed" with the disease, meaning patients are receiving unnecessary surgeries or other treatments even though the disease isn't likely to threaten their health. Learn more about Etzioni's study. »

• Dr. Peter Nelson and Daniel Lin are leading the first systematic surveillance study of men with prostate cancer, with a goal of finding biological clues — known as biomarkers — to answer a key question that has vexed researchers: when to take a "wait and watch" approach to prostate cancer and when to treat the disease. Five other institutions will enroll patients for the Canary Foundation-sponsored Prostate Active Surveillance Study; the Hutchinson Center will house the study's blood and DNA samples. Learn more about the multi-institution project. »

Understanding prostate cancer’s progression

• Dr. Valeri Vasioukhin and colleagues have uncovered a key driver behind the progression of prostate cancer — a discovery that could spawn new treatments to prevent the cancer's spread and improve survival rates. The researchers found that a protein called hepsin caused prostate-tumor cells to lose their grip from the surrounding tissue and spread from the prostate to bone, lung and liver. Learn more about the hepsin study. »

• Drs. Peter Nelson and Elahe Mostaghel, along with colleagues at the University of Washington and Oregon Health Sciences University, uncovered what may be the key to understanding why prostate tumors eventually become resistant to androgen-deprivation, or hormone-withdrawal, therapy. Their findings could help lead to better treatments for cancer that has spread beyond the prostate to distant sites throughout the body, such as bone, lymph nodes and internal organs. Learn more about their work on hormone-withdrawal therapy. »

• Dr. Norman Greenberg is leading a diverse team of scientists that is using highly specialized genetically engineered mouse models (also called GEMMs) to understand the molecular mechanisms that cause prostate cancer to develop and progress. In these studies Dr. Greenberg's team has already uncovered new insight into why certain patients develop a form of prostate-cancer that's resistant to the commonly used hormone-withdrawal therapy. This team has also shown that endocrine signals widely held to be responsible for driving prostate cancer growth may also have important properties that actually lessen the cancer's proliferation, raising the possibility that therapies designed to inhibit these signals could do more harm than good. Read more about Greenberg's studies on prostate-cancer therapies.»

Exploring prostate-cancer risks

• Obesity: Obese men who are diagnosed with prostate cancer have more than two-and-a-half times the risk of dying from the disease as compared to men of normal weight at the time of diagnosis, according to a study by Dr. Alan Kristal and colleagues. In an earlier study of more than 10,000 men, Kristal found that obese men have an 80 percent higher risk of developing high-grade, aggressive prostate cancer. Read more about obesity and prostate cancer. »

• Vegetables: Separate studies led by Dr. Alan Kristal and Dr. Ulrike Peters have found a connection between greater consumption of dark green and cruciferous vegetables, especially broccoli and cauliflower, and decreased risk of aggressive prostate cancer. Some previous studies have suggested tomatoes, which are rich with a nutrient called lypocene, help to ward off prostate cancer, but neither Kristal nor Peters found that to be the case in their studies. Neither study found associations between increased fruit intake and reduced prostate cancer risk. Drs. Daniel Lin, Beatrice Knudsen, Marian Neuhouser and Kristal are also examining how a biologically active compound in broccoli called sulforaphane affects mechanisms in prostate tissue that are related to cancer development.
  Learn more about vegetables and prostate cancer. »
  Learn more about tomatoes and prostate cancer. »

• Smoking: Middle-aged men who are long-term, heavy smokers face twice the risk of developing more aggressive forms of prostate cancer than men who have never smoked, according to a study by Drs. Janet Stanford, Thomas Vaughan and colleagues. Learn more about smoking and prostate cancer. »  

• Red wine: Men who drank four or more 4-ounce glasses of red wine per week experienced about a 60 percent lower incidence of the more aggressive types of prostate cancer, according to a study led by Dr. Janet Stanford. Learn more about red wine and prostate cancer. »

Dr. Ulrike Peters and colleagues have published studies showing an association between taking supplemental doses of vitamin E and selenium and decreased prostate-cancer risk in smokers. Another study published by Peters and colleagues found that risk of advanced prostate cancer was significantly smaller in men who took supplemental dosages of vitamin E for an average of 10 years.

• Smokers, dairy and fatty foods: Research led by Dr. Marian Neuhouser has found that current or former heavy smokers who ate more dairy foods had a 41 percent reduced risk of aggressive prostate cancer, compared to men in that category with lower dairy intake. On the other hand, smokers who followed diets rich in omega-6 fatty acids — found in large quantities in safflower, soybean and corn oils — faced a more than doubled risk of prostate cancer, but only if they had a family history of prostate cancer. Learn more about smokers' diets and prostate cancer. »

Prostate Cancer: Not an equal opportunity disease

• African American men have a 60 percent higher incidence of prostate cancer than Caucasian Americans and are twice as likely to die from the disease. Hutchinson Center researchers have been conducting a nationwide research project, called the Prostate Cancer Genetic Research Study (PROGRESS), that's aimed at understanding why some African-American families have several members with prostate cancer. Learn more about the study. »

• Dr. Ruth Etzioni and colleagues published the first study to document that frequency of prostate-cancer testing is associated with a patient's race. They found that African-American men with prostate cancer are half as likely as Caucasian men to receive annual blood tests — called prostate-specific antigen, or PSA, tests — to monitor their disease. Read more about prostate-cancer testing and ethnicity. »

• A Hutchinson Center research team has found that African-American men with prostate cancer were 26 percent less likely to receive aggressive hormone treatment for early stage prostate cancer than their Caucasian peers. Learn more about prostate-cancer therapy and ethnicity. »

Improving quality of life after treatment

• Dr. Janet Stanford and colleagues have shown that survival rates are comparable for the two major treatments for prostate cancer — radiation and prostate-removal surgery. Since both forms of treatment carry potentially disruptive side effects, this knowledge allows men to make treatment decisions based on quality-of-life concerns. Read more about research on prostate cancer and quality of life. »

• Stanford and colleagues also completed the first comprehensive study of sexual and urinary function among men who underwent radical prostatectomy — that is, surgery to remove the entire prostate — for early-stage cancer. The team found the impotence rate among these men was much higher than previously reported. They also showed that radiation therapy is better for avoiding urinary incontinence and impotence, but surgery is better for avoiding complications of bowel function. Learn more about the study on side effects of prostatectomy vs. radiation. »

Prostate Cancer: More Resources

• Every advance in cancer treatment in recent years has come out of clinical trials that test innovative medical approaches on patients. Find out more about clinical trials on prostate cancer. »

• The Hutchinson Center also conducts ongoing cancer-prevention studies that depend on participation of healthy volunteers. Learn more about getting involved in research studies. » 

• In need of medical attention for prostate cancer? Visit the Seattle Cancer Care Alliance to get help. »

• The Hutchinson Center is on a mission to eliminate cancer and related diseases as causes of human suffering and death, and you can help. Make a gift today. »