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 [...]
I just cannot remember where I put my keys. What is my home telephone number? What is his name, you know the guy I sit next to everyday in the office? Sound familiar, maybe because you are on hormone deprivation therapy (ADT) to treat your advanced prostate cancer. This can explain why your normally intact [...]
Having hot flashes because of hormone deprivation therapy (ADT)? All of us dealing with advanced prostate cancer will be on ADT, it is the usual first line of therapy and it will continue until we die. Men who elect to have radiation to treat prostate cancer as their primary treatment modality will often have some [...]
How much money is a drug worth and how much money should we be willing to spend for it have been questions that have been increasingly asked by economists, doctors and cancer survivors. Last month in an Op-Ed article three doctors from Memorial Sloane Kettering Cancer Center in New York (Sloane) let the world know [...]
When facing a post prostatectomy biochemical failure (PSA only failure) the best way to treat is still not known. Preliminary data from Johns Hopkins [1] and Duke Universities[2] have recently provided some of the earliest evidence that salvage radiotherapy may prolong overall survival versus delay of intervention until time of symptomatic progression. Despite [...]
I stumbled upon an abstract published at the end of February 2010 that raised a number of questions about hormone therapy (ADT) and its effect on the immune system. Coming out of the starting gate I assumed that ADT would adversely affect the immune system making us prone to falling victim to all sort of [...]
It is very common, men with advanced prostate cancer find that they are subject to confusion and memory loss; they experience a general dumbing down of their brain facilities. The most common culprits causing this are hormone therapy (ADT) and chemotherapy treatments. At this time we don’t have any great magic bullets to treat this [...]
I try not to get political in this blog, but current politics are directly involved in our healthcare and that is what I write about in this blog. I write this because all of my work is dedicated to improving the quality of life and for saving lives. Candidate Mitt Romney has been very clear; [...]
Data presented at the European Society for Medical Oncology annual congress in Vienna, Austria linked the delay of pain progression the functional decline of men with the newly approved drug Zytiga. The data was derived from an additional anaylisis of the phase 3 trial (COU-AA-302) that led to the FDA approval of Zytiga. The FDA [...]
It is the general consensus that prostate cancer when still confined to the prostate gland is gland curable, but when it has left the prostate gland and becoming metastatic it is no longer curable. But evidence now says there might be an intermediate stage where the cancer has spread outside the prostate gland but is [...]
