It has been announced that two important players in the fight against prostate cancer in New Zealand and Australia, ANZUP Cancer Trials Group (ANZUP) and the Prostate Cancer Foundation of Australia (PCFA) will work together to fund and implement new clinical trials. ANZUP, which is one of the leading collaborative trials group for urogenital and [...]
All Radiation therapy for cancer treatment, including both primary and adjuvant, is non-specific and kills not only cancer cells that it is targeting, but also healthy cells that happen to be in the target area. A common side effect on healthy cells is radiation burn. Radiation burn is characterized with skin, within the target area, [...]
Having chemotherapy causes all sorts of strains and difficulties. One almost universal side effect from chemotherapy is the difficulty many of us face in getting enough nutrition. Nutrition comes from eating food yet many of us just don't feel hungry so eating is difficult. We lose our appetite, food tastes terrible and we battle nausea. [...]
In an issue of ONCOLOGY, there was a review of the literature provides us with a comprehensive review of the limited literature on management of men with prostate cancer who have pelvic lymph node involvement but no known distant metastatic disease at diagnosis. Common folklore has been that these men, with limited pelvic lymph node [...]
Screening for early prostate cancer detection may reduce the rate of newly diagnosed metastatic disease. In a published study researchers evaluated the incidence of a men receiving a diagnosis of metastatic prostate cancer at their initial prostate cancer diagnosis using data extracted from the Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results (SEER) Program database. Their analysis was [...]
Side effects, or what are known as co-morbidities, often discourage men who have metastatic prostate cancer from continuing with chemotherapy (docetaxel). The question often asked is there a relationship between having side effects and the ultimate efficacy of the chemotherapy? In other words does having side effects have an effect on overall survival? To answer [...]
For cancer, January 2016 has been an unusual month. This January, cancer has managed to take the lives of three world renowned entertainers; David Bowie, Alan Rickman and Terry Wogan. Examining their deaths, we see that they all were marked with great outpourings of grief from their loved ones, colleagues and their fans. But they [...]
According to an article in the Journal of Nuclear Medicine, researchers compared a PET/CT scan using the radiotracer F-18 DCFBC to conventional imaging modalities — an expanded Tc-99m-methylene diphosphonate (MDP) bone scan and contrast-enhanced CT of the chest, abdomen and pelvis — to detect prostate-specific membrane antigen (PSMA), which is associated with prostate cancer metastases. [...]
There is a paradigm shift happening around us in the clinical care of men with metastatic hormone-sensitive prostate cancer. We now know that survival is better when docetaxel chemotherapy is added to androgen-deprivation therapy (ADT), but there have been and still remains concerns about the toxicity of the docetaxel. Recent findings from a new study, [...]
In General the use of a PSA value in excess of 4.0 µg/L is considered a clinical indicator for men at risk for prostate cancer. But, is this a good prognostic indicator in men who are HIV Positive? Researchers found that PSA was highly predictive of prostate cancer in men with HIV; however the commonly [...]
