Progress in Diagnostics and Therapy of Prostatic Cancer

There is now increasing awareness by the general public in European countries that prostate cancer is a serious threat to health, and this has created higher expectations for improved and more effective methods for detecting and treating the disease. However, urologists are very conscious of the limitations of the diagnostic methods that are available and are even more concerned about the apparent lack of therapeutic advances made during the past 50 years since Huggins discovered the fundamental principles of endocrine treatment for is theo­ prostate cancer. Recent efforts to detect the disease when it retically "curable" have been successful, certainly in the USA, but this has highlighted our uncertainty about the best treatment for early stage prostate cancer, and there is no doubt that radical pro­ statectomy is sometimes carried out on men who may not be threa­ tened by their illness. While it is generally accepted that many men with prostate cancer will die of old age rather than this malignancy, it cannot be ignored that this disease kills many others in a process that is frequently lingering, miserable, and humiliating, not only for the victim but also his family. There are many important issues about prostate cancer that remain unclear at the present time, some of which are addressed by the reviews in this book. The debate about early detection and screening can arouse considerable heat in otherwise placid urological mee­ tings.