The mere mention of it makes most men squirm. It occurs in the prostate, a walnut-sized gland at the base of the bladder that assists in the production of semen.
Prostate cancer is the most common cancer in American men, excluding nonmelanoma skin cancers.
It is also the second leading cause of cancer death in men, exceeded only by lung cancer. According to the American Cancer Society, an estimated 180,400 new cases of prostate cancer will be diagnosed this year and nearly 32,000 men will die from the disease in the United States. Often a silent disease, prostate cancer affects one in 10 men over the course of a lifetime. However, men diagnosed with prostate cancer enjoy a very high survival rate when the disease is treated. Eighty-nine percent of men diagnosed with prostate cancer survive at least 5 years and 63 percent survive at least 10 years.