• 2 weeks ago
Consultant urologist Dr George Lee Eng Geap, or a.k.a Dr G, answers a question related to prostate cancer posed by a reader who has been undergoing various checks to see if he indeed has the cancer.

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Transcript
00:00Last year we talked about various disease stages of prostate cancer and
00:05how we treat it and this year we're going to talk about how do you make the
00:09diagnosis and what does that lead to if you have the diagnosis of prostate
00:13cancer.
00:19Let's start with the diagnosis itself. Prostate cancer is a curious disease
00:24that actually does not necessarily manifest itself with any symptoms
00:30unless it's presented late. If someone presented with metastatic stage 4
00:35prostate cancer they might experience bone pain, difficulty passing urine, blood
00:40in the urine and even problems with anemia. However when men have early stage
00:46of prostate cancer the one thing that we want you to do is do a medical checkup
00:51and do a cancer marker. The cancer marker is called PSA. It's actually a prostate
00:59specific antigen. That itself just tells you something is wrong with the prostate
01:04but not necessarily cancer. So don't worry if your PSA goes up. So PSA going
01:10up it just increases your risk of making the diagnosis of cancer. So in order to
01:17that we have various forms to delineate or to determine whether you've got
01:22cancer. In the modern technology and also modern medicine there are effectively two
01:29ways to do that. One is to do a biopsy. A biopsy of prostate entails a needle
01:36going into the transrectal ultrasound probe and extract some samples. The
01:42biopsy itself may be a bit risky because biopsy can cause bleeding and
01:48can cause sepsis or difficulty in passing urine. So other form of
01:53detections of potential prostate cancer is an MRI scan. The MRI scan will show
02:00the configuration of prostate to see whether there's any risk of cancer. So we
02:05label it as 1 and 2 being low risk of cancer, 3 intermediate risk of
02:12cancer or 4 and 5 having high risk of cancer. If 4 and 5 appears on your
02:19prostatic MRI scan then we will do a targeted biopsy in order to enhance the
02:26yield and also reduce the complications. So for men who don't have symptoms and
02:32subsequently had a blood test that is abnormal then MRI or a direct
02:40biopsy will determine it. So for following week we want to determine if
02:45you unfortunately have the diagnosis of prostate cancer, what are the way to
02:51stage and grade the cancer. If you are interested stay tuned for next week's
02:56Putting Dr. G on the Spot.

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