Dietary Supplements For A Prostate Cancer Patient

Even at the earliest stages, when they are totally sure that they can cure you of prostate cancer, any cancer specialist doctor will still insist that you make some dietary changes to your eating habits to improve your chances of healing, and to reduce the possibly that your prostate cancer can relapse. This is no fluke because the foods you eat have a great deal of influence in the incidence of prostate cancer anywhere in the world.

A good example, one might suppose, is the higher incidence of prostate cancer in the industrialized nations of the West as against the incidence of the melanoma in Third World countries. For some reason, South America, Africa, and Asia do not suffer from prostate cancer as much as the United States, Canada, and certain parts of Europe do. Of course it is possible that there are various other environmental factors that might contribute to these statistics, but so far studies have strongly implicated treated foods and high calorie diets as contributory to the incidence of prostate cancer.

It is thereby no error of chance that diet is listed as a primary (casual) risk factor for prostate cancer; and in that light, you might want to pay attention to what the oncologist suggests and start to work on your diet. Better still, perhaps you should not wait until then before you get at it; instead you could begin right away and start to work on helping yourself live a longer healthier life in spite of your risk of prostate cancer, or diagnosis thereof.

First of all, you want to increase your intake of vitamin E, which is critical in forming red blood cells and muscles and tissues in your body. In addition, vitamin E has antioxidant properties that inhibit the dangerous oxidation of free radicals in your body that have been implicated as cancer causing agents. You will get your vitamin E abundant in vegetable oils, wheat germ, liver, and leafy green vegetables. You might also want to look around for sources of the mineral selenium, an element found in tiny amounts in plants and yeasts and associated with lowered risk of prostate cancer.

Lycopene is another dietary supplement that you should totally pick up because of its well known healing effects for prostate cancer patients. Also rich with antioxidant qualities, you will obtain it primarily from tomatoes, and you can also get lycopene from broccoli. You will need to work on your vitamin D sources as well, if you will hope to effectively cure yourself of prostate cancer. It is a mineral that essentially protects the body from the effects of low calcium intake and also lowers the risk of prostate cancer, while also lowering your PSA levels.

And while you are taking on all these new diet supplements for prostate cancer patient, you might want to do away with dairy, low-fat milk and other dairy products that have a vitamin A palmitate constituent. The substance has been shown to contribute to the risk of prostate cancer because it reacts with zinc and protein to form an unabsorbable complex. In the same breath, you want to do away with diets rich in animal fats, red meat, and high fat dairy products; what you need really is just a vegan diet, and some fish, and you will cure faster.

Prostate Cancer Treatment By Surgery And Impotency Side Effects

There are several forms of surgery that can treat prostate cancer and even cure the malignancy with an excellent prognosis if the disorder is identified and diagnosed early enough. As a matter of fact, surgery is a preferred approach by many cancer specialists for intervening with prostate cancer at all stages of the syndrome, except if is considered too dangerous for the patient. It is possible, if the melanomas have spread so far from the prostate glands as to reach various bones and tissues all over the body, for treatment by surgery to be unviable.

Prostatectomy is basically the surgical removal of the prostate or parts of it. It may be employed for various infections and disorders of the prostate, principally benign prostate hyperplasia (BPH), but in the treatment of prostate cancer, it is often aimed toward curing the disease at its earliest stages before it gets a chance to spread. It is also considered for cancers that fail to respond to radiation therapy. The surgeon can do the operation by making an incision through the abdomen of the patient to remove the tumor, or by making the incision through the perineum – the skin between the scrotum and the anus.

A radical prostatectomy is often advised when the tumors have not spread beyond the prostate, and a laparoscopic prostatectomy, which assures a shorter stay in the hospital, smaller incisions, and faster recovery than traditional standard prostatectomies may be employed if the surgeon is indeed properly trained and has a surgical robot to boot. A transurethral resection works well for BPH, while cryosurgery is currently the acclaimed champion of prostate cancer surgeries (even though it is still in research) because it virtually guarantees less invasiveness, less requirement for general anesthesia, causes fewer problems with urinary control, and superior to radical prostatectomy for recurrent prostate cell malignancy following radiation therapy.

Howbeit, best surgery for prostate cancer included, these operations more often than not, tend to leave the patient impotent. They still feel sensations in the genital area, and they are still able to achieve orgasm, but the ability of the man to attain erection and to ejaculate at the climax of intercourse is often impaired by the time the prostate cancer surgery is over.

It is a fact that many men opt for surgery still even after they are informed that they could become impotent as a result to the treatment; but they are not necessarily excited about it, and if they can, they would love to do something about it. Thankfully, there are treatments that can aid with achieving erection, the most popular of which is Viagra. It does not work for every patient, but it is at least a lifeline that they can try out first. Even if the doctors are unable to guarantee the quality of sperm, at least the patient out to still be able to have intercourse.

Prostate Cancer Treatment – Estrogen Therapy: Estrogen Patches

One of the earliest treatments that may be considered for a prostate cancer patient is hormonal therapy, and it is also one of the most effective. It does have a limitation of not actually being able to cure the carcinoma, but hormonal therapy (or hormone treatment) is extremely helpful in slowing the progression or the disease or even stopping its growth. In several intervening instances, hormonal treatment is in point of fact employed to cause the cancer tumors to shrink so that the patient can be operated upon or radiation therapy can be applied.

Hormone treatment is a helpful technique for managing certain cancers because several of them, especially the cancers of the male and female reproductive systems, depend heavily on gender specific sex hormones to breed and propagate. By denying the tumors the critical hormones that are required to fuel their growth, physicians are able to starve the melanomas such that they lose momentum and are curtailed. Then other therapies may be employed to do away with them.

There are two ways in which hormonal therapy can be used manage prostate cancer. One way is by actually carrying out a surgery to extract the gland in the body that produces the implicated hormone, which would be the adrenal gland in the male system that secretes testosterone and dihydorepiandrosterone. The second approach is to find an alternative means to stop or counter the production of these hormones. The use of estrogen patches for prostate cancer treatment is one such alternative approach.

Estrogen therapy for prostate cancer treatment usually uses any of the group of female sex hormones that stimulate secondary female sex characteristics and control growth of the lining of the uterus during the first part of the menstrual cycle (estrone, ethinyl estradiol, and estriol, all produced primarily in the ovaries) in the male body to counter the effect or production of adrenal endocrines to arrest the growth of prostate tumors either in oral form or in form of the contraceptive patch. Synthetic forms of these estrogens also exist, namely Stilbestrol and ethinyl estradiol, five and ten times as potent as estrone, and used to treat advanced and disseminated cancer of the prostate gland in men.

Estradiol is a specific estrogen that has found great use in this regard. Beyond merely relieving the discomforts of menopause, it also helps in treating breast and prostate cancer. The estradiol contraceptive patch is a small, plastic skin patch that women usually use to release low doses of female sex hormones into their system to prevent pregnancy. But more than that, it also helps to prevent the secretion of the adrenal hormones in the male reproductive system, so that the cancers of the prostate can be starved as required.

The application of this medication should however never be attempted without the guide of a certified doctor because they can advice best what doses of the patch is required to limit the side effects. You should be advised that hormonal treatment doesn’t exactly cure prostate cancer; it merely makes it easier to be treated by other therapies like surgery and radiation.

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