“Just because you have an enlarged prostate, doesn’t mean you have prostate cancer,” Dr. Dayes said. “Unfortunately, the only sign that people get that is really suspicious is pain in their bones and, at that point, it’s too late to actually talk about life-saving treatment.”

Being proactive is the best course of action.

Dr. Dayes said men in their 50s should have a conversation with their family doctor about prostate cancer, detection methods – including prostate-specific antigen screening and regular exams – and their pros and cons.

PSA testing does find cancer, he said.

“But one of the problems is it finds a lot of cancers that are really slow growing, well behaved and are never going to harm the patient,” Dr. Dayes said. “Testing leads to more tests if a test is positive and sometimes people can go through a whole range of painful procedures only to find out that it really wasn’t that serious, so it’s a bit of a gamble. The best thing is to know your options.”

Dr. Dayes said when men find out they have the disease, they’re usually sent to a urologist for a biopsy.

They’ll then hear the treatment options available to them, which may include surgery or radiation, he said.

“As far as we can tell there is no superior treatment,” Dr. Dayes said. “As a general rule, younger guys are more likely going to go the surgery route. Older guys are more likely going to want to go the radiation route.”

Dr. Dayes said generally for every 100 men who get prostate cancer, somewhere around 20 of them will die of the disease.

The upside is life-expectancy can be good, he said.

“There are other options,” Dr. Dayes said. “Even if somebody gets treated and it comes back, we can put them on hormone treatments, which really slow down the rate of growth, so you can very often just keep putting off into the future the downsides to prostate cancer. Often times, it doesn’t catch up to guys until 15, 20 years out.”

Dr. Dayes said there are different sources of information for prostate cancer, treatment, etc.

“Men’s best source of advice is their family doctor,” he said.