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About 80 percent of men who reach the age of 80 have prostate cancer. Men have traditionally been less likely to seek medical attention than women, especially for minor problems which often serve as warning signs for more serious underlying illness. In most men, prostate cancer grows very slowly: most men will never know they have the condition.

Early prostate cancer is confined to the prostate gland itself; most of the patients with this type of cancer can live for years without any problems. Prostate cancer is characterized by ‘grade’ and ’stage’; grade is given to indicate how quickly a cancer is growing — the higher the grade, the more likely it is that the cancer will grow and spread rapidly and the size and extent of the tumor will determine its stage.

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After skin cancer, prostate cancer is now the most frequently seen type of cancer in American men and it is predicted that just about 220,000 men in the United States will be diagnosed as having prostate cancer during 2007 and that approximately 27,000 men will die from the disease.

However, as with many conditions, prostate cancer survival rates are not the same around the globe and this should give us the data that will allow us to improve our treatment methods.

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With most things in life it is true to say that the more practiced and experienced you are the better your performance and this is most certainly true with prostate cancer surgery.

One of the biggest problems with cancer is that, in spite of the best efforts of your surgeon, it has a bad habit of recurring in a number of cases. In the case of prostate cancer following the total removal of the prostate by radical prostatectomy recent studies show that, while the chances of a recurrence are around 18 percent where surgery is carried out by a fairly inexperienced surgeon, this figure falls to under 11 percent in more experience hands. So just what do we mean by ‘experienced hands’?

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