Once you have prostate cancer disease, especially advanced prostate cancer, the most important question for patients and their families is whether it can still be treated. The most important question is how long can we survive without treatment? How long can you survive with aggressive treatment?
Sometimes, there is no standard answer to these questions.
Since it is advanced prostate cancer, it means that the tumor has invaded, with local metastases and distant metastases. In any patient with advanced tumor, his life does not last long, and advanced prostate cancer is no exception.
But unlike other advanced cancers, some patients with advanced prostate cancer are sensitive to hormone blockade therapy, or endocrine therapy, and after all-male blockade therapy, prostate-specific antigen (PSA) can be significantly reduced, and in some cases, even bone metastases disappear, and survival is not a problem for more than a decade.
But most patients with advanced prostate cancer, after aggressive treatment, have a median survival time of about 18 months and eventually die because of multiple organ failure. If you don’t go to aggressive treatment, surviving 3 months is probably a miracle.
So, once detected, aggressive treatment is definitely beneficial, and endocrine therapy is almost painless and not expensive to treat, and almost most families can afford it.