Changing the name could lead more low-risk patients to skip unnecessary surgery and radiation, experts say.
Often, doctors offer patients with the lowest score — Gleason 6 — a way to avoid surgery and radiation: active surveillance, which involves close monitoring but no immediate treatment.“I would be over the moon if people came up with a new name for Gleason 6 disease,” Penson said. “It will allow a lot of men to sleep better at night.”
Name changes have happened previously in low-risk cancers of the bladder, cervix and thyroid. In breast cancer, there’s an ongoing debate about dropping “carcinoma” from DCIS, or ductal carcinoma in situ. What to call it instead of cancer? Proposals include IDLE for indolent lesion of epithelial origin, or INERRT for indolent neoplasm rarely requiring treatment.Steve Rienks, a 72-year-old civil engineer in Naperville, Illinois, was diagnosed with Gleason 6 prostate cancer in 2014. He chose active surveillance, and follow-up biopsies in 2017 and 2021 found no evidence of cancer.
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