Most of the others will be in their 50s and early 60s, at the peak of their working careers. A minority will be in their 40s, although some major medical institutions are reporting a spike in the number of younger men with prostate cancer. This year, some 39,200 American men, many in hospices or at home and attached to morphine pumps, will die from a cancer that began in a gland a little larger than a golf ball. The prostate gland, nestled under the bladder adjacent to the rectum, produces the seminal fluid that carries sperm. Prostate cancer contained in the gland itself isn't fatal.
Death comes if the cancer spreads beyond the prostate to bone, lungs, liver or brain.
Next to highly curable forms of skin cancer, carcinoma of the prostate will be the most diagnosed cancer in the United States this year, according to the American Cancer Society. Nearly one in six men will get the disease sometime in their lives. In Texas alone, an estimated 11,900 men this year will learn that they have prostate cancer, according to American Cancer Society statistics, and 2,500 will die from it. Like the national trend, prostate cancer is expected to be the most diagnosed malignancy in Texas in 1998. Most patients will die with the disease rather than from it because prostate cancer usually is slow growing.