One of the common and constant complaints I hear at prostate cancer support groups is about the need to wake during the night and use the bathroom to urinate (nocturia). There is a relationship between our ageing and the need to urinate at night, but it does seem to be made even more acute if [...]
The PSA controversy continues to plague men’s health. The United States Preventive Task Force’s recommendation against using the PSA blood test as a screening tool for prostate cancer (PCa) will bring additional harms to men. Since the beginning of PSA testing the mortality rate from prostate cancer has declined significantly, but there has been no [...]
Better prediction tools to predict treatment outcome in men with metastatic castration-resistant prostate cancer (mCRPC) should significantly improve treatment outcomes. Without good predictive measures we often don't know when is the optimum time to stop a therapy and move to another. This means that we might maturely stop an effective treatment losing the effectiveness of [...]
Men initially diagnosed with advanced prostate cancer often face a serious question, whether traditional primary treatments that would remove or make smaller their primary tumor (“debulking” the tumor) provide any advantage or extend their survival. Since the most commonly used method to debulk tumors is surgery or radiation the question becomes if the risks of [...]
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, [...]
Based on six recent retrospective analyses comparing the gonadotropin-releasing hormone (GnRH) antagonist degarelix against the traditional luteinizing hormone-releasing hormone (LHRH) agonists (i.e. Zoladex, Lupron etc.) men with advanced prostate cancer experienced improved disease control, fewer instances of urinary infections, and a lower risk of cardiovascular events. The six analyses compared data from randomized trials that [...]
Men who elect to have a radical prostatectomy (surgical treatment for prostate cancer) as their primary treatment often panic if they find out that they had positive surgical margins (PSMs). Positive surgical margins are an indication for the use of adjuvant radiotherapy. Despite this automatic response the association between PSMs and prostate cancer-specific mortality (CSM) [...]
Castate resistant metastatic prostate cancer (mRPC) withvisceral disease (tumors involving the internal organs of the body, specifically those within the chest (as the heart or lungs) or abdomen (as the liver, pancreas or intestines) is a negative prognostic factor. In many cases clinical trials of new investigational drugs rule out men with visceral disease from [...]
Last Thursday’s New York Times had an article about Dr. Perry Hudson, in 1950s a medical researcher at Columbia University. The article was about his research on skid row in New York City where he offered alcoholics in lower Manhattan an offer: If they agreed to surgical biopsies of their prostates, they would get a [...]
Extra radiation will not keep the doctor away, so why do we use it? According to a recent study published in the Oct. 9 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association most men who are given radiation to control pain from bone metastasis accompanying advanced prostate cancer undergo more treatments than they really [...]
