Circulating tumor cells (CTCs) is an area we will continue to hear more about as their importance to our understanding prostate cancer continues to increase. CTCs show the movement of cancer cells though the body. It is believed that these CTCs are the method that cancer uses to spread through our body (metastasize). Measuring the [...]
Higher circulating tumor cell counts are associated with an increased risk of death. Men with metastatic castrate resistant prostate cancer don’t have a good biomarker to predict survival. According to a study published online ahead of print in the Journal of Clinical Oncology. by Amir Goldkorn, MD, and colleagues at the Keck School of Medicine of [...]
Sipuleucel-T (Provenge) has shown in clinical trials that it prolongs overall survival (OS) in asymptomatic or minimally symptomatic men with castrate resistant prostate cancer (CRPC). Unlike many other treatments for men with CRPC there are not any reliable biomarkers to show that it is working for any individual. There is also a lack of markers [...]
Satraplatin is an oral platinum drug that is believed to bind the DNA of the cancer cell, which then prevents the cancer from being able to reproduce. Satraplatin had been tested in a phase III trial in men with metastatic castrate-resistant prostate cancer (mCRPC) who have failed chemotherapy with docetaxel. It failed because it did [...]
The best way to understand your PSA kinetics, especially its changes, is to be able to visualize them on a graph. This allows you to understand significant changes in our PSA earlier on than you might otherwise perceive them. Any man whether diagnosed with prostate cancer or not should be recording their PSA scores and [...]
There was a recent study to investigate the predictive value of the number of extra-spinal organs involved by metastases for survival in metastatic spinal cord compression (MSCC) from prostate cancer. This was a very small study of only 95 men irradiated with 10×3 Gy for MSCC from prostate cancer. The investigators considered seven factors: Age, [...]
Researchers at Johns Hopkins has concluded that metastasis-free survival appeared to independently predictor of overall survival (OS) in men with recurrent prostate cancer who underwent androgen deprivation therapy (ADT) after developing metastases. Men with biochemically recurrent prostate cancer (PSA only) tend to survive for long periods so the FDA gold standard for clinical trial endpoint [...]
On August 13, 2013 I wrote an important post about the terrible practice beginning to rear its head called step therapy. Step therapy is the practice of insurance companies requiring less expensive drugs be prescribed prior to more expensive ones despite the comparative efficacy of the drugs and their different mechanisms of action. This practice [...]
Many men, after they have had a radical prostatectomy, find that their testosterone levels are low and are desirous of supplementing their testosterone. (This low level of testosterone is not a result of the surgery). One way of supplementing androgens is by transdermal testosterone-replacement therapy (TRT), but TRT also has the undesirable effect of increasing [...]
Researchers at Duke University observed a survival benefit for men who had salvage radiation therapy (RT) for prostate-specific antigen (PSA) failure after radical prostatectomy (RP) in the men who experience a rapid rises in PSA doubling time (DT,< 6 months). They then asked whether such a benefit also exits in men with a protracted PSA [...]
