Prostate Cancer Diagnosis
Email Raji.Kooner@svha.org.au or call 02 8382 6980 for a confidential appointment.
Prostate cancer is a very common condition.
It occurs mainly in older men, with in fact 80% of 80 year olds have some degree of prostate cancer but increasingly it’s been diagnosed in younger men.
Last year 18,000 men in Australia were diagnosed with prostate cancer and 3,000 lives were lost to this condition.
Just about everyone knows someone with prostate cancer.
It maybe a father, a brother, an uncle or a very good friend.
It hence represents a very large burden of disease with enormous social impact to our society.
Prostate cancer is something that I’m passionate about.
I’ve dedicated much of my professional life in perfecting the diagnosis and management of prostate cancer.
Prostate cancer is a very heterogeneous disease which really means, it means different things to different people.
Sometimes it can be very active or very aggressive.
Sometimes prostate cancer can be very slow growing and not cause a problem in that patient’s lifetime.
So it’s really important for patients to be assessed completely on a case by case basis.
Usually what I do in my practice is that we spend a long time with patients generally discuss all the treatment options with patients, the pros and cons of each treatment, what the potential side effects of each treatment is and what those side effects mean to that patient and then usually over a number of consultations we will decide together what is best for that particular patient.
So I think really prostate cancer is something that I’m really passionate about, fortunately we’ve got excellent treatments that are now available for it and I think it’s a really important issue in our community.