Men who have decided to have radiation as their first (primary) treatment for prostate cancer have a one-third chance of recurrence. Some of those men have salvage radical prostatectomy (SRP) to fight the recurrence. A study shows this might be a good idea. Antoni Vilaseca, MD, etal from Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York, studied 251 men [...]
Advanced prostate cancer will eventually end, barring another cause of death, with the demise of the individual survivor. Knowing that you suffer from a terminal illness is hard, it is hard on the family and it is hard on the individual. Many of us don’t think about it, but it is also hard for many [...]
Prostate cancer tends to metastasize to bones as opposed to soft tissue and other organs. We have no idea why it does have a preference for bone, but it does. Developing bone metastases in prostrate cancer is a very strong negative prognostic indicator. Prostate cancer’s tendency to favor bone over soft tissue causes significant morbidity [...]
We know that men with metastatic castration-resistant prostate cancer (mCRPC) and visceral metastases have a worse prognosis than those with non-visceral metastases. The important question we need to understand is what, of our currently available treatments, might be effective for this more aggressive and deadly type of prostate cancer? Results of the phase 3 AFFIRM [...]
You have been diagnosed with advanced or metastatic prostate cancer. It is a shock, you have cancer and your cancer has already spread outside of the prostate gland. Your doctor might have already told you that at this stage it is no longer curable, and technically it can be called terminal! That is a lot [...]
Today’s New York Times (8/23/16) had an article written by Austin Frakt, which should be of interest to all of us with prostate cancer. The article, “Why It’s Crucial to Choose the Right Hospital appeared on page A3. The entire article is best described by the first sentence, “There’s an exceeding simple way to get [...]
The standard of care is to offer androgen deprivation therapy (ADT) to men with prostate cancer who have a rising prostate specific antigen (PSA) after an attempt to cure their cancer with primary therapy that has failed (PSA relapse) or in men who are considered not suitable for curative treatment. The question is what is [...]
We are seeing more and more novel therapies being developed to treat castrate resistant metastatic prostate cancer (mCRPC). One such therapy involves theranostic (individualized therapies for various diseases, and to combine diagnostic and therapeutic capabilities into a single agent) concepts using radiolabeled ligands of the prostate-specific membrane antigen (PSMA). In a recent study, designed to [...]
Increasingly, we are seeing younger men diagnosed with prostate cancer and with bone metastases. One of the more common therapies, radiotherapy is recognized for its effect on local control of bone metastases, but whether it could prolong overall survival, the gold standard is still controversial. Researchers retrospectively evaluated 113 men with prostate cancer and bone [...]
According to researchers at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston Ma., men with aggressive prostate cancer who have radiation therapy to treat the cancer have better overall survival rates when the therapy is given at a high volume treatment facility. Paul Nguyen, MD, a physician researcher in the department of Radiation Oncology at Brigham said, “Our paper shows that [...]
