The following was written and posted by Paul Edwards to the Advanced Prostate Cancer Online Support Group: The March 2014 issue of the Asia-Pacific Journal of Clinical Oncology published an article “Why do some cancer patients receiving chemotherapy choose to take complementary and alternative medicines and what are the risks?” by authors from University of Queensland [...]
Docetaxel is the only globally approved first-line chemotherapy for the treatment of castrate resistant prostate cancer. Yhe universal truth is that all men taking docetaxel will become refractory to the treatment. Zoledronic acid (ZA) is the most commonly used member of nitrogen-containing bisphosphonate family. By itself it has anti-tumor activity, including in prostate cancer. In [...]
Researchers have reported ahead of print that substance use disorders may adversely affect outcomes in men with advanced prostate cancer This conclusion was drawn from a very large study of 14,277 men with advanced prostate cancer. The study found that men with advanced prostate cancer along with a substance abuse disorder were 2.3 times more [...]
British Men Who Have Had Abiraterone Will Not Get Enzalutamide Despite Its Life Extending Ability Our brothers in England hit a major snag last week as NHS placed a burdensome restriction on the use of enzalutamide (Xtandi) for men with advanced prostate cancer who have already had abiraterone (Zytiga). Because of this ridiculous decision thousands [...]
There are conferences for doctors and conferences for researchers, but there is also a conference just for prostate cancer survivors and their caretakers! The Prostate Cancer Research Institute (PCRI), a partner of Malecare, annually sponsors the only patient conference in the world. I have attended the conference over the last five years and strongly recommend [...]
In my most humble opinion among the most vital and impactful program in the world, which supports prostate cancer research funding and prostate cancer research resources, is in trouble. It is the only government program that funds only prostate cancer research. All of its research funding mechanisms are designed to fund high risk and potentially [...]
Yesterday’s post was about the use of chemotherapy (with docetaxel) for the treatment of men with advanced prostate cancer who were 80 years old or older. Today’s post is about the use of chemotherapy in men 60 years or younger. The research for both of these posts was performed by the same team of scientists [...]
Chemotherapy (chemo with docetaxel) has a reputation for being a difficult therapy loaded with many side effects. I believe that this reputation is overblown given that all of our new non-chemotherapies (other than Provenge) come with their own list of significant side effects. However, its reputation is in the minds of many, so men who [...]
In yesterday's post I wrote about the possibility of looking for the presence of the splice variant ARV7 to determine if you would be resistant to enzalutamide (Xtandi). Today I am going to expand on this issue and discuss an additional study that demonstrated that the presence of ARV7 in circulating tumor cells not only [...]
I have written a lot about how we need more data about the many new drugs we have to treat men with advanced prostate cancer. The many questions that continue to swirl around us pertain to the development of cross resistance (taking one drug causes another to not work) between these new drugs, knowing the [...]
