What to Consider when you are Diagnosed with Early Stage Prostate cancer

This section summarizes key points to consider when you’ve been diagnosed with early-stage prostate cancer. The list is by no means exhaustive, and there might be other points that you want to think about as well. The goal is to help you focus on what you need to know about each stage of disease so you can hold meaningful, regular dialogues with all members of your health care team as you find the treatment path that’s right for you.

1) The Gleason grading scale runs from 1 to 5, where 1 represents cells that are very nearly normal, and 5 represents cells that don’t look or act much like normal prostate cells at all. The Gleason score, or sum of the two most common Gleason grades (and therefore on a scale from 2 to 10), tends to predict the aggressiveness of the disease and how it will behave in your body. Tumors with higher Gleason scores, typically above 7, tend to be more aggressive.