One of the terms we hear in the world of cancer is precision medicine. In the area of prostate cancer what does this really mean? Precision medicine is a very broad term, but it can be better described as looking at an individual man’s genetic code and the genetic code of their tumors for the [...]
CVS Health, a major retail pharmaceutical insurer and supplier has raised some consternation and concerns and it should also raise yours. Last Tuesday, CVS rolled out their 2017 formulary list that left off the some of the world’s top-selling drugs including a vital castrate resistant prostate cancer drug. The pharmacy benefits manager removed from their [...]
Hormone therapy (ADT) is notorious for providing us with side effects. Some of these side effects are best described as ones that deteriorate our general quality of life. For example the most common one we all are familiar with is, of course, hot flashes. You could also add erectile dysfunction as well as loss of [...]
Pamorelin (Trelstar® )is going to become available in the Philippines. Pamorelin, and Decapeptyl® will be made available to urologists and oncologists who treat men with advanced prostate cancer. It will be available in one, three and six month formulations. Pamorelin is an agonist analogue of the natural gonadotropin-releasing hormone (GnRH). It is designed to chemically [...]
The American Association of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) released a very important new policy statement that details their position surrounding the prescribing of opioids to cancer patients. This issue has taken the forefront of controversy as our society increasingly becomes concerned about the overuse of prescription opioids, sometimes leaving out the very specific needs of cancer [...]
Speaking with men who have taken abiraterone (Zytiga, ABI) and enzalutamide (Xtandi, ENZA), at Malecare we sometimes hear reports of both cognitive and mood changes brought on by these two drugs. Evaluating these two problematic side effects researchers have confirmed our experience, both of these drugs can cause these symptoms and that more men reported [...]
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 [...]
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, [...]
