Is low-grade prostate cancer actually cancer? Maybe not, experts say

It may be time to rebrand low-grade prostate cancer to something other than “cancer,” a group of international experts says.

Prostate cancer is one of the most common forms of the disease globally, with nearly 1.5 million new cases and 397,000 deaths in 2022.

But a specific type of early-stage cancer – known as Grade Group 1, or GG1 – is common among older men and doesn’t spread beyond the prostate, meaning a cancer diagnosis may cause patients unnecessary alarm, according to the group of cancer doctors, scientists, and patient advocates from the United Kingdom, Germany, Australia, the United States, Senegal and Canada.

GG1s also often escape diagnosis because doctors don’t typically recommend biopsies unless they suspect someone has a higher-grade cancer.

That means GG1 detection is often incidental to other health issues, according to the group, whose conclusions were published in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute.

“The word ‘cancer’ has resonated with patients for millennia as a condition associated with metastasis and mortality,” Dr Matthew Cooperberg, a urologic cancer surgeon at the University of California San Francisco and the group’s principal investigator, said in a statement.

“We absolutely need to monitor these abnormalities no matter what we label them, but patients should not be burdened with a cancer diagnosis if what we see has zero capacity to spread or to kill,” he added.

This isn’t the first time medical experts have called for low-grade prostate cancer to be downgraded.

In 2022, doctors said that giving it another name could mean fewer men face anxiety over a cancer diagnosis or go through unnecessarily aggressive treatment, which could lead to negative side effects.

Low-risk cancers of the bladder, cervix, and thyroid have also been rebranded in the past, and are now instead labelled as “lesions”.

But the vagueness of these titles can confuse patients, who may equate their diagnosis with cancer anyway and experience “needless anxiety” that could be cleared up if doctors communicated better, Canadian researchers recently found.

Cooperberg and his colleagues did not agree on a potential alternative label for GG1, but said “acinar neoplasm,” referring to an abnormal growth in a gland, has the broadest support from doctors.