Stefania Staibano
Editor
2013
For many years in the past, few patients with prostate carcinoma were treated by surgery. Two were the main reasons. First, diagnosis often occurred at such an advanced stage of the illness as to make radical treatment impossible. Second, the few patients who underwent surgery were routinely left incontinent. An alternative to less-than-adequate surgical treatment was hormonal therapy which was the fruit of Huggins’ 1941 study. It offered a satisfactory cure, indeed it is still efficacious at present. Hormonal therapy had the advantage of prolonged patient survival while affording fairly good quality of life. For a long time the clinical approach to prostate carcinoma has been based on these fundamentals.