prostate-report.org

Do patients on watchful waiting experience anxiety and distress?

Specialists say that when doctors recommend watchful waiting (active surveillance) and other forms of “non-interventional” management for prostate cancer, patients suffer unduly from anxiety and distress while living with “untreated” cancer. There are some patients who find the idea of living with “untreated” prostate cancer too difficult to deal. There are patients who have been on such protocols long-term without experiencing no problems.

A new study at Erasmus University Medical Center, Rotterdam, the Netherlands.based on monitoring of men being managed with watchful waiting in the Netherlands, has now quantified these feelings, along with their associations with various psychologic, medical, demographic, and decision-related factors.

According to study conclusion, many patients are perfectly capable of “living with” low-risk prostate cancer if they are appropriately informed and monitored. Certainly there will be patients for whom this is not the case, but this study suggests that these patients are in a significant minority (of perhaps 10-15 percent of the total).