One of the common and constant complaints I hear at prostate cancer support groups is about the need to wake during the night and use the bathroom to urinate (nocturia). There is a relationship between our ageing and the need to urinate at night, but it does seem to be made even more acute if [...]
The dirty little secret that is kept from most of us when we receive primary treatment for prostate cancer is that there is a recurrence rate approaching 33%. This amazingly high rate is consistent no matter what primary treatment is elected. Radiation, surgery, HIFU the rates are the same, about 1/3 of us will experience [...]
The PSA controversy continues to plague men’s health. The United States Preventive Task Force’s recommendation against using the PSA blood test as a screening tool for prostate cancer (PCa) will bring additional harms to men. Since the beginning of PSA testing the mortality rate from prostate cancer has declined significantly, but there has been no [...]
My blog post last Friday was among the top twenty most important ones I have written. I want to be sure that if you have taken Provenge commercially, meaning not during a clinical trial, you need to know that you might have been under-dosed and might need to be retreated. Dendreon, the company that manufactures [...]
It was announced that some dosages Provenge (sipuleucel-T) did not meet the potency release specification for CD54 upregulation, an error that might affect the ability of Provenge to kick-start the immune system. This quality control error affected less than 0.3% of Provenge’s commercial doses released since its commercial launch. Dendreon has agreed with the Food [...]
One thing I have noticed at some of the support groups I run is that there seems to be a very uneven distribution of when men start taking Zoledronic Acid (ZA). Hormone therapy (ADT) has many negative side effects and the loss of bone mineral density (thinning of the bones) that ZA (and similar drugs) [...]
When I had my prostate cancer recurrence it was characterized by a PSA in the mid 80s and a few positive lymph nodes showing on scans. My situation (oligo-recurrent prostate cancer) was described in a recent literature review called Salvage Therapy of Small Volume Prostate Cancer Nodal Failures: A Review of the Literature. The review [...]
When I opened my computer this afternoon I checked the Malecare prostate cancer crowd-funding site to see how things were going. To my great pleasure I discovered that Start A Cure (www.StartACure.org) had achieved it first funding success! Sometime in the early afternoon some very kind individual made the pledge that completed the funding goal [...]
Better prediction tools to predict treatment outcome in men with metastatic castration-resistant prostate cancer (mCRPC) should significantly improve treatment outcomes. Without good predictive measures we often don't know when is the optimum time to stop a therapy and move to another. This means that we might maturely stop an effective treatment losing the effectiveness of [...]
When I was diagnosed with a prostate cancer recurrence I was at the young age of 55 years. I live in New York City where there are a number of face-to-face support groups for prostate cancer, but none had any other men with advanced disease. At a support group run by Malecare I finally lost [...]
