Study supports watching some early-stage prostate cancers

It’s probably human nature to question why your healthcare team would advise against treatment after you’re diagnosed with prostate cancer. But the active surveillance approach — monitoring the disease rather than immediately treating it with surgery or medications — has additional evidence of effectiveness in a large recent study.

The study, published in JAMA, included 2,155 older men with early-stage prostate cancer. Most of the participants had a low-grade form of prostate cancer at diagnosis — meaning a biopsy showed that the cancer cells looked more like healthy cells and tended to grow and spread more slowly than more aggressive types.

While a small group of men received treatment shortly after diagnosis, the rest followed an active surveillance approach. They were given regular prostate-specific antigen (PSA) tests, digital rectal exams and scheduled biopsies of prostate tissue.