Can a person wait as long as six months to decide whether or not to have surgery for prostate cancer that is low Gleason score and low volume?
Yes and No. If the biopsy suggests the cancer is low volume and low grade, the final prostatectomy specimen will confirm this impression 80-85% of the time. However, the biopsy is only a sample, and in 15-20% of cases, there will be significantly more cancer or cancer at or beyond the margin of the prostate gland or higher Gleason grade cancer. Therefore, I advise my patients to wait only 6 weeks after the biopsy to let the inflammation subside and then schedule surgery as soon as they conveniently can schedule it.
