Having your advanced prostate cancer progress to becoming castrate resistant is a major moment in our life. For many of us becoming castrate resistant signals a major change, a foreshadowing of what the future holds. Becoming castrate resistant heralds our eventual decline which can only lead us to one destination, our demise. How long it [...]
A comprehensive study of prostate cancer tissue done in the UK has revealed that a completely new gene network takes over driving the cancer in men who are castrate resistant. The research was published in Cancer Cell. Researchers at the Cancer Research UK Cambridge Research Institute, at the University of Cambridge studied tissue samples from [...]
Once you have had primary treatment for prostate cancer you must continue to actively monitor your PSA until you die. There is no cure; at least you should never assume that you have been cured because 1/3 of all men who have treatment will have a recurrence. What treatment you have does not matter, statistically [...]
Genomic Health, Inc. has announced they have had positive results from a large clinical validation study of a biopsy-based prostate cancer test designed to predict adverse pathology in men with early prostate cancer. The study, performed in collaboration with prostate cancer researchers at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), met its primary endpoint by [...]
The summer is coming to a close and I am back, ready to again take on the world. I had the fantastic opportunity of spending almost two weeks in Alaska, a land that is so different from the lower 48. I have to say that I have a new found respect for those individuals who [...]
All of us in the prostate cancer world know that the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force (USPTF) has announced its recommendation against routine PSA screening for men. There remains much debate and unhappiness in both the medical community (urologists and oncologists) as well as in the prostate cancer community itself. There remains a lot of [...]
Not in the normal realm of advanced prostate cancer, but important for the prostate cancer world is the news that the FDA has approved a new screening test for prostate cancer. The currently used screening tool, the PSA has only a 55% accuracy rate and as recently run into serious trouble with The U.S. Preventive [...]
There has been an on-going debate on the advanced prostate cancer on-line support group about the issue of the efficacy of Provenge in light of the expectation of a person's increasing PSA number while getting the treatment. For many men with advanced prostate cancer this is a reason they elect to pass on this treatment [...]
According to data presented at the 2012 American Society of Clinical Oncology Annual Meeting in Chicago. (Abstract # 4655) the presences of liver metastases predicts shorter overall survival in men with metastatic castration-refractory prostate cancer (mCRPC). William Kevin Kelly, DO, Thomas Jefferson University Hospital and the Kimmel Cancer Center at Jefferson, and colleagues from the [...]
According to the results of a study published in the Journal of Clinical Oncology a bone scan index (BSI) can assess response to treatment and predict survival in metastatic hormone-refractory prostate cancer. Men who have castrate resistant or metastatic hormone-refractory prostate cancer that no longer responds to hormonal therapy and has spread to distant sites [...]
