As drugs are developed they are given many different names, but the drug (or treatment) is the same despite its name. For us laymen, multiple names for the same drug is confusing. So, why are there so many different names for the same thing? Drugs usually have three different names; A chemical name that relates [...]
Historically, too many men were haphazardly treated for prostate cancer. Happily, the incidents of over treatment have been declining and the general acceptance of Active Surveillance has emerged as the preferred management strategy for men with very low–risk prostate cancer. However, There is still too few high-quality comparative effectiveness studies evaluating the incremental risks associated [...]
Today, I have some good news to share with you. Malecare, along with many other prostate cancer advocacy groups have been hard at work attempting to persuade members of Congress to not only maintain the Department of Defense Prostate Cancer Research Program (DoD PCRP), but to increase its funding for the next fiscal year. I [...]
According to researchers at the H. Lee Moffitt Cancer Center & Research Institute, men with a mutation in their VAC14 gene are more susceptible to Docetaxil chemotherapy induced neuropathy and nerve pain. This debilitating side effect results from damage to the peripheral nerves and is felt by the man as weakness, numbness and pain most [...]
Family history and genetics. Prostate cancer is often referred to as a family disease. Is it and what does this actually mean? Malecare's Advanced Prostate Cancer Program Director, Joel Nowak, interviews Dr. Lorelei A. Mucci. Dr. Mucci is an epidemiologist specializing in prostate cancer. She works at the Harvard University School of Public Health in Boston, Massachusetts. [...]
We have a number of newer hormone pathway drugs now available to treat men with metastatic castrate resistant prostate cancer (mCRPC). Researchers have shown that prostate specific antigen (PSA) response can be used as a pharmaco-dynamic end-point that may help identify men with early resistance to these new drugs. They found that there is clinical [...]
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 [...]
In a recently published commentary about the optimal type of multi-modal hormone therapy for Gleason grade 4 and 5 prostate cancer the author addressed the discordance between results of several randomized trials evaluating survival benefit of continuous androgen deprivation therapy in men with high-risk disease. The study found that after combining data from multiple trials, [...]
Making treatment decisions once you have been diagnosed with prostate cancer is difficult. Often, it is impossible to accurately and reliably be able to predict the eventual course of the cancer. Prostate cancer, besides being one of the slower growing cancers, is also one of the deadliest. So good, informed decisions are vital. The original [...]
The possibility of having incontinence as a side effect from all of the primary prostate cancer treatments is significant. Incontinence is not an either or thing as the degree of incontinence varies from individual to individual. Those men having significant levels of inconvenience find that their quality of life is significantly damaged in some cases [...]
