Testicular Cancer-causes,treatment and Prevention

Last Updated on Sunday, 2 May 2010 02:35 Written by Natural Health Team Sunday, 2 May 2010 02:35

What is testicular cancer?

The body is made up of many types of cells. Normally, cells grow, divide and then die. Sometimes, cells mutate (change) and begin to grow and divide more quickly than normal cells. Rather than dying, these abnormal cells clump together to form tumors. If these tumors are cancerous (also called malignant tumors), they can invade and kill your body’s healthy tissues. From these tumors, cancer cells can metastasize (spread) and form new tumors in other parts of the body. By contrast, noncancerous tumors (also called benign tumors) do not spread to other parts of the body.

What are the testicles?

The testicles (also called the testes or gonads) are the male sex glands. They are located behind the penis in a pouch of skin called the scrotum. The testicles produce and store sperm, and they are also the body’s main source of male hormones. These hormones control the development of the reproductive organs and other male characteristics, such as body and facial hair, low voice, and wide shoulders.

How common is testicular cancer?

A. In 2000 (the last year for which figures are available) there were 2,000 new cases of testicular cancer diagnosed in the UK.   In the USA, it is estimated that there will be 9,000 new cases diagnosed in 2004.  This means it is between 1% and 2% of all cancers in men.  The number of cases has been slowly increasing for some time.

What causes testicular cancer?

The causes of testicular cancer and reasons for the recent increase in frequency in some countries are unknown.

Exposure to female hormones in the environment, in water (possibly from the oral contraceptive pill in water supplies) has been suggested.

Undescended testicles (in which one or both testicles stay inside the body after birth and never sit in the scrotum) are a major risk factor.

Types of testicular cancer
There are two main types of testicular cancer:
·    seminoma, and
·    non-seminoma
The terms ‘seminoma’ and ‘non-seminoma’, refer to the type of cell which make up the cancerous tumour. Semioma testicular cancers only contain seminoma cells. Non-seminomas may contain a variety of different cancer cells. However, both types of testicular cancer are treated in a similar way.

Treatment
Treatment after orchiectomy depends on the stage and histology of the tumor–pure seminoma versus mixed or nonseminoma (Table 3). Seminoma is extremely radiosensitive, and low-stage disease is treated with radiation to the inguinal and retroperitoneal areas. Cure rates for low-stage disease now approach 99 percent.8 Men with nonseminomatous germ cell tumors of the testis can be managed with observation, chemotherapy or RPLND.

In carefully selected cases, observation is advocated by some authors for low-stage, less aggressive tumors, since relapses are very responsive to subsequent chemotherapy or surgery.8,20 The National Cancer Institute’s CancerNet Internet site (http://cancernet.nci.nih.gov) frequently updates treatment protocols for each type and stage of testicular cancer.

Prevention
here is no known way to prevent testicular cancer.
All men (specifically those aged 18-44 years) should perform monthly testicular self-examinations. The point of these examinations is not to find a cancer but to get familiar with how your testicles feel so that you will notice if something changes.

testicular cancer

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