Planting A Prostate Cancer Cure

When Greg Malcolm learned last May that he had prostate cancer, he assumed the worst. He worried that radiation treatments, lose time at work and perhaps suffer from posttreatment erectile dysfunction.

Thankfully, his fears turned out to be overblown. On Friday, September 9, 2005, Malcolm had an outpatient procedure performed at Medical City. There, Dr. Gregory Echt, a Medical City radiation oncologist and president of the Prostate Seed Institute implanted radioactive metal seeds the size of rice grains into Malcolm's prostate gland. The seeds put the radiation needed to treat Malcolm's cancer right at the location without affecting healthy surrounding tissue.

The whole procedure took only a couple of hours, after which Malcolm went home, showered, went to lunch with his wife and then took it easy through the weekend. On Monday, he was back at work. "Nobody at work ever knew that anything was taking place," says Malcolm. "That's how discrete it can be."

Today, Malcolm is doing great. His score on the prostate-specific antigen (PSA) test, which is considered a predictor of prostate cancer, has fallen from the danger-zone level of 6-plus into a favorable reading of less than 2. The treatment did not curb Malcolm's sexual life, nor did he suffer any of the urinary control problems that can sometimes result from other types of prostate cancer treatments. "Nothing has changed in my life," says Malcolm. "That's what I love about this procedure."

Malcolm isn't the only one who loves the benefits of using this radioactive seed therapy, scientifically known as brachytherapy. In nearly a decade of performing brachytherapy treatments, Dr. Echt has treated more than 1,600 prostate cancer patients who come to Medical City from throughout the Dallas area and beyond in order to receive his care. "If you are going to have this treatment done, you want it done by someone who has performed a lot of these procedures," says Dr. Echt. "Nobody else in the Dallas area has this amount of experience."

Prostate seed implant therapy was first pioneered by researchers in Seattle approximately 15 years ago. Before then, all patients were treated with external beam radiation or surgery, often involving the removal of the entire prostate gland (radical prostatectomy). Brachytherapy offers some advantages over the other treatment options.

For example, while external beam radiation treatment has to be given over eight weeks, and surgery requires up to six weeks of recovery, brachytherapy procedures can be completed in an hour with the patient back on his feet the next day. Where surgery patients face significant risk of urinary leakage or erectile dysfunction, brachytherapy patients experience much lower incident of each side effect.

Brachytherapy isn't for everyone. If the cancer has spread beyond the prostate itself, Dr. Echt sometimes recommends a combination of brachytherapy and a five-week course of external beam radiation. But according to Dr. Echt, for many of the 235,000 men in the U.S. who will be diagnosed with prostate cancer this year, prostate seed implant could be a "wonderful treatment."

For physician referrals for this procedure, please call (972) 566-7111.

For more information on the procedure, please call (972) 566-8500.

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