How to Understand Doubling Time With Prostate Cancer

While a majority of your effort in dealing with prostate cancer will be spent fighting the disease itself, a significant portion of your time will be spent attempting to make sense of the complex medical terminology surrounding the disease. Understanding the common medical terms surrounding prostate cancer treatment, such as "doubling time," can help you to have more intelligent and meaningful conversations with your physician, increasing your role in the treatment process.

Instructions

• 1

  Understand the basic definition of doubling time to increase your understanding of the topic in relation to prostate cancer. Doubling time refers to the amount of time it takes before a given quantity doubles. In discussing prostate cancer, there are two main markers which doubling time is used to measure. These include the doubling time of the tumor itself, and the doubling time of your level of PSA (prostate specific antigen), a substance excreted by the prostate which is a marker for the development of prostate cancer.

• 2

  Understand the significance of doubling time in relation to prostate cancer. While it is simple enough to grasp the concept of a tumor doubling in size, the importance of PSA levels doubling can be slightly more obtuse. In a study conducted at the Mayo Clinic and published in the December 2005 edition of the Journal of Urology, it was established that PSA doubling time (or the general rate of increase in PSA) could be used as a marker to determine how well a patient fares after undergoing a prostatectomy. In general, a PSA level that rises more than 3.4ng/ml per year increases the patient's risk of death by six and a half times. Thus, the higher the doubling rate of your PSA level, the less positive your overall prognosis.

• 3

  Understand how this risk translates to the rate of cancer development to complete your understanding of the importance of doubling time. According to information from the Prostate Cancer Research Institute, when the doubling time for PSA is less than 10 months there is a high risk that the cancer will metastasize, or spread throughout the body. Where the disease has already metastasized, the PSA doubling time is, on average, only around 2.5 months.