By:JOSEPH KELLARD
The New York Prostate Institute at South Nassau Communities Hospital aims to be a comprehensive research center focused on educating patients and physicians, and to advance and teach prostate brachytherapy, hospital officials said. While NYPI offers traditional external radiation treatments, the institute will focus on brachytherapy, a procedure that puts the radiation as close to the tumor site as possible, including injecting radioactive seeds into the growth.
Among the institute's main goals is to expose patients to various options for prostate treatment, Dr. Louis Potters, founder of NYPI, told a team of SNCH doctors, administrators and hospital staff at the institute's ribbon-cutting ceremony last Wednesday. "I want patients to be well educated on all the options and nuances particular to each individual's case," Potters said. "Sometimes the best option will be radiation seeds, sometimes surgery, and sometimes intensity modulated radiation therapy (IMRT), a form of external beam radiation."
Potters pioneered prostate brachytherapy during his tenure in radiation oncology at the North Shore University Hospital, performing his first procedure in 1992. Two years later, Potters became chief of radiation oncology at Mercy Medical Center, and in 1997 he took the position of associate professor in radiation oncology at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center at Mercy. An author of more than 40 peer-review articles on prostate cancer, Potters now joins Dr. Edward Mullen, a specialist in advanced technologies of therapeutic radiation oncology, at SNCH to develop NYPI into an internationally recognized center of excellent care of prostate cancer.
According to the American Cancer Society, about one-third of American men will have microscopic signs of cancer by age 50, and two-thirds to three-quarters will have some cancerous changes in the prostate glands by age 75, although only about 16 percent of these men will actually be diagnosed and treated for cancer.
"Everyone diagnosed with prostate cancer thinks: 'Cancer? My life is over. That's it,'" said Mullen, a cancer researcher at the University of Pittsburgh before he came to SNCH in 2000 to lead all the hospital's radiation oncology programs. "This fear comes from not really knowing what is available and what can be done. We now have a place, a forum and a tool for our patients and their loved ones to find out what their problems are and what can be done."
In outlining the goals of NYPI at last week's ceremony, Potters explained that most people perceive radiation therapy as a last-ditch effort for treatment of prostate cancer. "In fact, nothing can be further from the truth," he said. "Radiation is a proven mainstay of prostate cancer treatment."
While at Sloan Kettering, Potters was the first physician on Long Island to treat prostate cancer with IMRT, an advanced external radiation that treats tumors with high doses of radiation, and is most effective with prostate cancer.
Potter said that with 15 years of data on brachytherapy as a one-time, one-day outpatient treatment, the procedure is less traumatic than a radical prostatectomy, but has the same success rates and "generally a better side-effect profile."
Potters said NYPI has perfected a new technique for seed implantation - called dynamic inverse plan real time brachytherapy - which offers the best possible implant using the smallest number of radioactive seeds.
"Potentially [we] can eliminate the use of combined treatments with prostate brachytherapy," Potters predicted.
"What makes this place so special," he said, "is we have three differentiators: education for the patients and their families, the experience of our team, and research and understanding in treating prostate cancer. It is really the first such center of its kind on the East Coast."
David Ackman, Nassau County commissioner of health, presented both doctors with a citation from County Executive Tom Suozzi.
"It's remarkable that a relatively small community hospital is able to create cutting-edge treatment and approaches to a community that might previously have had to travel to New York City or somewhere else," Ackman said. "I think it really is to South Nassau's credit to have moved ahead in such an ambitious and remarkable way to bring this new type of treatment to the South Shore."
