The History of Prostate Cancer
The history of prostate cancer began in 1536, when its symptoms were described by an anatomist of the time. It was not given official identification until the year 1853. In those days, prostate cancer was thought to be a rarity among diseases, because their life span was shorter and detection methods were poor. The first surgeries for prostate cancer were done in the 1890’s, with mixed results. In 1904, the first surgery was done to remove the prostate gland.
In the 1940’s, a man named Charles Huggins began using the female hormone estrogen to combat the production of testosterone in men that had metastatic prostate cancer. This was the original “chemical castration”, and won the researcher the Nobel Prize for medicine in 1966.
Treatments that include retropubic prostatectomy were developed in the 1980’s by Patrick Walsh. This type of procedure allowed the surgeon to remove the prostate and its lymph nodes, without affecting penile function.
In the early history of radiation therapy, physicians utilized radium implants, but by the middle of the 20th century, when stronger sources of external radiation were available, the external beam became more widely used. Chemotherapy was studied for prostate cancer in the 1970’s, and brachytherapy with seeds implemented was first utilized in 1983.
Prostate cancer has a strong link to families’ genetics. It can re-occur in families once the first men in a family have had it, but it doesn’t necessarily mean that all or most men in a family will be affected. And some men who contract prostate cancer have no family history of the disease at all.
Recent studies have determined that a family history of prostate cancer does increase your chances of developing the disease, and the closer that you are related to the prostate cancer victims in your family, the more likelihood that you will develop it.
Relatives that are closer to you, such as your father, or a son or brother, are called first-degree relatives. If you have men in this group that have had prostate cancer, your chances are greater to develop the disease. In fact, larger studies show that if you have first degree relatives who have had prostate cancer, your chances of developing prostate cancer yourself are about 2.5 times as high as a man whose family does not have a history of prostate cancer.
In addition, if your relatives with prostate cancer are diagnosed early in life, that makes your chances higher as well. If you have more than one first-degree relative who is diagnosed at any age with prostate cancer, your chances increase to over five times that of a person with no family history of the disease.
