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Does age discrimination affect prostate cancer treatment? Very often,
it does. Some otherwise healthy men with prostate cancer are ruled
out as candidates for curative treatment because their doctors think
they’re too old. It works the other way, too; some men in their
sixties, who have other serious health conditions in addition to cancer,
probably won’t benefit from surgery.
Does age discrimination affect
prostate cancer treatment? Very
often, it does. |
The key is frailty — and its reverse
condition, general good health, says geriatrician Sheila Gonzalgo,
M.D., M.P.H., the Carolyn and Bill Stutt Scholar. “Some people
are afflicted with it as they age,” she explains. “For
reasons we don’t yet fully understand, frailty is a biological
syndrome, characterized by weight loss, weakness, exhaustion, and
loss of muscle mass and strength.” She has been working to
quantify frailty as a factor in determining how well a man will recover
from a serious illness, such as cardiovascular disease, dementia,
lung disease, and cancers including prostate cancer. She has also
been looking at frailty in data collected from the Cardiovascular
Health Study, involving more than 2,200 men, ages 65 to 100, to determine
how a man’s general health affects his chances of being helped
by surgery.
“Our preliminary findings appear to support the notion
that some men with prostate cancer aged 65 to 74 years, and possibly
aged 75 to 84, might be amenable to more aggressive forms of therapy,” she
says. Further studies are needed to determine which men would benefit
the most — and the least — from prostate cancer screening
and surgical intervention. |
