Siteman Cancer Center Offers “Male Lumpectomy” for Prostate Cancer

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Siteman Offers “Male Lumpectomy” for Prostate Cancer
Published on 24 February 2009

Feb. 23, 2009 – Surgeons at the Siteman Cancer Center at Barnes-Jewish Hospital and Washington University School of Medicine have a new procedure for prostate cancer that takes an approach similar to that used in treating breast cancer in women. Instead of removing the entire prostate gland, a lumpectomy removes only the cancerous tumor.

Dubbed the “male lumpectomy,” the procedure is a targeted technique in which urologic surgeons destroy the tumor without removing the entire prostate. The tumor is either frozen using cryoblation or eliminated with a laser through laser ablation.

“This allows us to destroy the cancer in the specific region of the prostate it’s found,” says Gerald Andriole, MD, chief of urology at Washington University School of Medicine. “It may well represent an improvement in how we take care of men who have small prostate cancers confined to the prostate.”

Since the male lumpectomy keeps the prostate gland in the man’s body and only destroys the tumor, incontinence is not an issue after the procedure, and most men avoid erectile dysfunction.

Andriole says the approach is very similar to a lumpectomy for breast cancer patients.“Often doctors can see the lump on a mammogram, or they can feel it when they examine the breast,” he says. “Surgeons who care for those patients don’t necessarily remove the entire breast. They may perform a lumpectomy.” This male lumpectomy approach has only recently become feasible as techniques for performing a biopsy of the prostate have improved. “Because our new biopsy techniques are so strong, we have confidence that we know exactly where the cancer is located inside the prostate,” Andriole says. “In our view, if you have good information about where the cancer is located, you can then ablate or destroy that region of the prostate on an outpatient basis. In doing so, we very likely will destroy the entire prostate cancer,” he says.