Statin drugs improve blood cholesterol levels, but they also cause problems. They also seem to lower the risk of prostate cancer recurrences post surgery by as much as 30% according to researchers at Duke University. These findings are published in the journal Cancer. Stephen Freedland, M.D., a member of the Duke Prostate Center and the [...]
How are funding decisions made for Medicare and Medicaid? What drugs are to be funded? These questions have recently come to our attention as many of us have attempted to have Medicare fund our use of Provenge. The administration of Medicare is actually broken into 15 different regions, or MACs (Medicare Administrative Contractors). Each MAC [...]
Yesterdays Wall Street Journal publish a very important piece by Melinda Beck in their Health Journal (http://tinyurl.com/2dtrrll) . Everyone should go to the piece and read it. The piece, The Prostate Cancer Quandary, has received some play in the prostate community, but its real importance to us has not yet been recognized by our community [...]
A new phase 3, registration trial has been announced by OncoGenex Pharmaceuticals, Inc. of its investigational drug custirsen sodium (OGX-011/TV-1011). The trial, for men with metastatic castrate resistant prostate cancer (mCRPC) is referred to as the Prostate Cancer SATURN Trial. This randomized, controlled, trial will include approximately 50 cancer centers and is planned to enroll [...]
What are you going to do if you have had radiation therapy as a primary prostate cancer therapy and the cancer has reoccurred? If the disease has remained in the prostate gland some men are able to go back and have surgery, but the condition the gland has been left in post radiation makes it [...]
Hot off the press- The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has approved Sanofi-Aventis SA's new chemotherapy drug for advanced prostate cancer. The drug, Jevtana (cabazitaxe) extended by nearly 2-1/2 months the lives of men with prostate cancer tumors that resist standard treatment with hormones as well as chemotherapy. The drug will be used after [...]
The approval of Provenge has once again brought to the forefront the very important questions about the proper timing of treatments as well as the issue concerning how to combine therapies to maximize survival. We have, although there numbers are limited, different treatments that are used for the treatment of advanced prostate cancer, but we [...]
For years there remains this terrible hidden question, does an androgen blockade (ADT) provide any survival advantage to men with early advanced prostate cancer? We do know that ADT will have a significant negative impact on ones life, this is guaranteed. We do know that if we go on a blockade our life will change. [...]
We all have been warned about the potential risk that hormone therapy (ADT) can cause to our heart and vascular health. A report from Lancet Oncology confirmed that men with prostate cancer living in Sweden when on hormonal therapies significantly increase their risk for experiencing a thromboembolic disease event. […]
Johns Hopkins, Roswell Park Cancer Institute and Duke University have announced data at the ASCO meeting in Chicago from a 200 man phase II clinical trial of a blood vessel-blocking drug called tasquinimod. This “anti-angiogenesis” drug constricts the blood supply to prostate tumors by blocking new blood vessel development. The study showed that tasquinimod slowed [...]
