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Why should you receive treatment of
urologic cancer at AMC?
With a high incidence of urologic cancers, prostate cancer, kidney cancer, and bladder cancer accounts for 16% (as of 2015) of the ten most common cancers in men. Meanwhile, the mortality rates are less than 8% because early screening and diagnosis improved prognosis. Therefore, most cases are completely healed and minimizing complications is as important as treatment since they have long duration of illness.
AMC’s Urologic Cancer Center enhances the efficiency of treatment process through a systemic and consistent diagnosis and treatment and solidifies its status as a leader in cancer treatment by introducing newly-developed treatment methods for urologic cancers. The AMC Cancer Institute uses Korea’s first integrated treatment system to determine the best and optimal treatment for each patient through cooperation of the department of urology that offers specialized surgical treatments depending on the type of cancer, the department of oncology that performs pre-/post-operative palliative chemotherapy, the department of radiation oncology that implements radical, adjuvant, or palliative radiation therapy, the department of radiology that takes a biopsy and interprets medical images, and the department of pathology that involves pathological reading. Its long-term treatment services promote the improvement of patient satisfaction and quality of medical care. A conference is also held on a monthly basis to collect complicated cases to find the best treatment.
The Urologic Cancer Center will strive to provide urologic cancer patients with optimal medical services using abundant experience and expertise through a close collaboration of professionals of each specialty. We will not rest on our laurels but will continue our efforts to grow and become the world’s leading urologic cancer-specialized center.
Treatment options
Prostate cancer is curable. However, even if it has not been cured, further treatment can help control the growth of the cancer. There are various treatments for prostate cancer, but they are not always necessary and may cause complications. To choose the safest and most effective treatment among surgery, radiation therapy, hormone therapy, and chemotherapy, it is required to carefully look at the type of disease or patient’s characteristics such as age, health condition, the stage of cancer, malignancy of cancer, and response to hormones.
Chemotherapy
A primary treatment for prostate cancer with metastasis is hormone therapy. It prevents or slows down the progression of cancer by blocking or suppressing the production of male hormones that are needed for prostate cancer to grow. Chemotherapy is used in a progressive-type cancer that is not confined to the prostate gland or has already spread to other parts of the body, which makes it difficult to obtain satisfactory results with topical therapies such as surgery or radiotherapy. Chemotherapy is also performed on patients with postoperative lymph node metastasis or to prevent a relapse before and after radiation therapy.
Radiotherapy
Radiotherapy is a procedure for destroying cancer cells using high-dose radiation. It can be used instead of surgery to treat localized prostate cancer without remote metastasis, and also applied when a tumor is not completely removed by surgery or when a cancer has relapsed after surgery. Furthermore, radiotherapy is performed to completely cure the cancer or relieve symptoms like pain.
Surgery
Robotic prostate cancer surgery
Unlike open surgery, laparoscopic surgery makes about five 5-12 cm-sized small incisions to reduce postoperative pain and the risk of infection, allowing for a shorter hospital stay and fast return to normal life. Meanwhile, robotic surgery that builds on the strengths of laparoscopic surgery enables a surgeon to use a camera and robotic arms to remotely perform the operation while watching the 10-15 times magnified 3D images on the screen. It is very much like the experience of performing open surgery. Robot-assisted surgery significantly enhances surgical precision since it uses robotic arms that can move beyond the range of human hands’ motion without the slightest tremor.
AMC has first introduced robotic surgery for prostate cancer in August 2007 and has three robotic surgery machines as of December 2015. The advancement of AMC’s robotic surgery was possible because of a compelling experience of more than 3,000 robotic surgeries for prostate cancer and the largest number of open surgery for prostate cancer.
AMC's treatment performance
According to AMC Cancer Institute’s statistics published in 2015, 8.3% of patients with newly diagnosed major urologic cancers in Korea received treatment at AMC; and more than 2,000 urologic cancer surgeries were performed in 2015. With great clinical experience and research achievements, Professor Choung-soo Kim of the department of urology and Professor Jae-lyun Lee of the department of oncology participated as co-authors of papers published in the New England Journal of Medicine, the world’s most prestigious medical journal, in 2014 and 2015 respectively.
