My dad has just been told he has Prostate cancer

Maybe you will create a similar profile for your father.

Gleason 4+3=7 is classed as intermediate cancer and is usually curable like mine was. l suggest you order the information-packed ‘Toolkit’ folder from this website.

It’s definitely not the end of the world, as many men here will attest to.

Best of luck to Pop.

Cheers, John.

I think everyone has a bone scan onece cancer has been found.
It's not any hint or suggestion that they think it's spread, but they do need to rule that out.

Thank you so much!

I wonder what the highest is without mets?

The highest I've heard of without mets was 130 IIRC, which was my GP's father.

I don't know what the staging was, but I presume it was confined. He had an op which I've never heard of which consisted of vacuuming out all the prostate cells, but not touching the urethra, so there's no incontinence issue afterwards. I don't know which country it was in, but not the UK. As far as I know, it was a success.

My GP told me this when I said to him I'd never heard of anyone else as high as 57 (mine) without mets, at a point when I was still waiting to be checked for mets.

Thanks for replying. I guess our concern at the minute is the bone scan. The doctor said he isn’t expecting anything to show up but still nerve wracking until we get the results. If MRI was clear is that a good indication bone scan would be or are they not linked? 

The MRI scan will have been just the pelvis area, and concentrating on prostate, and the tissue nearby such as seminal vesicles, lymph nodes. It's a special type of MRI called multi-parametric (mpMRI) which is optimised for detection of changes in soft tissues. It will include the lower spine, pelvis and top of the femurs and they would have commented if they saw significant changes in these, but it's really for checking the prostate and other soft tissues.

The bone scan is whole body, and works a completely different way. They inject a tracer, wait a couple of hours for it to be attracted to any bone mets (or more strictly, faster growing areas of bone, so it also identifies any healing bone fractures), and then you lay on a table while several cameras do one slow pass up your whole body (takes about 40 mins) and can see where the tracer has concentrated. It's not noisy or claustrophobic, if that's any concern. The tracer is radioactive (which is how the camera sees it through you body and clothes) and you need to avoid getting very close to children and pregnant mums for 6 hours or so, until it's decayed away.

Sometimes a whole body MRI scan is done too, but not at the first stages of diagnosis. This would be if they suspect distant mets for some reason which other scans have not been able to find.

We had a brief talk on this at the Mount Vernon support group on Wednesday.
The consultant said the high resolution PSA tests (I guess that's the two decimal places version) were for patients after RP, and were unnecessary in other cases. This was in the context of, if you are asking your GP to do the followup PSA tests, they need to be the high resolution tests if you've had a RP. (If the hospital/consultant is requesting them, they will know this anyway.)

That’s reassuring to hear. How did he recover after the operation? Any tips? We have read some of the side effects can be pretty bad 

That may be true of the lab that this particular urologist uses, but will not apply to other members here. 

Well, this was in the context of patients who are getting their PSA tests done by different labs than at the hospital.

I just looked back at all mine, and they're all to 2 decimal anyway (analysed at Luton & Dunstable Hospital path lab), so maybe that's all they do there even when not strictly required. My initial charity funded test has no decimal places, so presumably a cheaper analysis. I spoke with a different charity just recently, and they get their PSA analysis done for £4 each - those may be no decimal places too.