Prostate Cancer

A new paradigm in Diagnosis and Management

Focalyx is a resource for both Patients and Physicians in the management of Prostate Cancer.

Prostate Cancer, unfortunately, is a common disease. Men quantified in the hundreds of thousands receive a diagnosis of Prostate Cancer any given year. Tens of thousands perish from this disease. Leaving hundreds of thousands dealing with deleterious and for too many of them unnecessary side effects from common definitive management options such as surgery, radiation therapy or hormonal deprivation –castrating – therapies.

Most patients opt for such therapies because of the “fear of death”

However, recent research providing Level I evidence based medicine from multinational, international, randomized studies shows that “death” remains elusive for most prostate cancer patients. Unfortunately, side effects from those treatment options such as erectile problems, ejaculation loss, urinary incontinence, weakness, loss of stamina and impaired wellness are far too common, frustrating events that leads to patient regret.

Moreover, exhaustive analysis from critical and transcendent studies published over the last 3 years, lead the United States Physician Task Force (USTF)) to a “D” recommendation for Prostate Cancer Screening. That means in simple terms that risks of screening outweighs its benefits. Other important organizations such as the American Urological Association, the American Cancer Society and the Society of Urologic Oncology disagree with the USTF recommendations, yet stress that screening must be performed in a more efficient manner and that for many patients, perhaps a majority of those diagnosed with Prostate Cancer Active Surveillance, or Vigilance may be a better option so adverse events are prevented. Notwithstanding, the potential benefits of Active Surveillance preventing unnecessary side effects from classical treatments, it comes with problems of its own. First, significant intellectualization by patients that they have Cancer but it won’t harm them. Easily said than done! Second, most criteria for Surveillance have been derived from patients whom were treated, opening critics about dogmatic elements of this approach. Third, the likelihood of histological or risk group “misclassification” range around 50% within 2 years. Fourth, most surveillance studies have failed to measure or register le levels of anxiety associated to a Prostate Cancer diagnosis highlighting a pervasive fact associated with this management approach. Lack of compliance surveillance protocols, that is, surveillance patients are more treated by Physicians other than the ones who enrolled them in a surveillance protocol.

Focalyx has emerged to challenge the establishment paradigm. Focalyx believes and recommends screening as means to detect Prostate Cancer at early stages of disease and therefore prevent death. The problem is not screening, its applying treatments whom magnitude are disproportionate to the amount of cancer harbored by a given patient. Under the Focalyx paradigm, MRI/US Fusion techniques can be used with the purpose of identifying precisely prostate cancer lesions, sampling them and destroying them in-situ with no adverse quality of life events