Many men with prostate cancer will not require any immediate treatment. This would be the case with very elderly men who are diagnosed with very early disease. In this case it might be likely that the men in question would never have any problems caused by their prostate cancer and pass away from other causes, without ever being bothered by the tumour. Patients may be advised by their doctors to adopt a wait and see policy. The advantage of this approach is, of course, that there are no side effects associated with doing this!