ABSTRACT
Prostate cancer is a uniquely challenging disease. At the heart of the challenge is the disparity between the mortality rate, and the incidence of the disease. Prostate cancer is generally a disease of old age. Its age-specific incidence curve shows a steady rise, with most cases being diagnosed in men in their sixties and seventies. Prostatic intra-epithelial neoplasia was so named because it was presumed to be the precursor of prostate cancer, in the same way that cervical intraepithelial neoplasia is of cervical cancer. High-intensity focused ultrasound is another non-invasive technique, which uses an ultrasound probe in the rectum, which can be focused to a specific region of the prostate and generate a thermal injury. An Medical Research Council randomized trial of clodronate versus placebo in patients with hormone-sensitive bone metastatic prostate cancer showed only a non-significant trend to an improved time to first symptomatic metastases.
