These included whether the tumor had penetrated the outer covering of the prostate and whether there were positive surgical margins, a pathologic measurement of residual cancer. The study defines who can be cured much better than we were able to do before. In terms of research, it's a quantum leap forward. If you know what part of the cancer drives the disease, you know where to focus your research. The study is being published in today's issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association .
Prostate cancer is the second most common cause of cancer deaths among men.
It was responsible for more than 39,000 deaths in the United States in 1998, according to the American Cancer Society. Some 184,500 men were diagnosed with the disease that same year, according to cancer society figures. In the Stanford study, the researchers tracked the progress of 379 cancer patients who had had their prostates surgically removed between August 1983 and July 1992 at Stanford University Medical Center. The researchers followed the men, whose median age was 65, for a minimum of five years in order to clearly define when surgery had been successful and when it had failed. At the same time, the Stanford group examined the patients' diseased prostates in the laboratory, measuring nine tumor characteristics, including tumor size, whether blood vessels in the prostate were invaded by the disease and whether the cancer extended outside the organ.