Once again we see what seems to be logical isn’t necessarily the way it actually works! In a surprising study result, it was shown that the use of intermittent androgen-deprivation therapy (IADT) for prostate cancer is not associated with fewer long-term adverse events than continuous ADT! Who would have guessed? We all thought that intermittent [...]
This afternoon I am off to the American Society for Clinical Oncology Genitourinary Cancers Symposium (ASCO GU) in San Francisco. There has already been some information leaking to the media about some of the presentations that will be going on at the conference. One such “leak” is about findings from Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center [...]
Knowing the negative prognostic factors for successful treatment when you have a a biochemical recurrence (PSA only) of your prostate cancer is important. These factors can help you make your treatment decisions because they assist you in evaluating your possible clinical outcome. In a single institutional review of negative prognostic outcomes of salvage radiotherapy in [...]
Understanding a little about the prostate gland and its biology is not only interesting, but it allows us to ask some important questions that can be very specific to our prostate cancer treatment decisions and our eventual outcomes from these decisions. It also can simply add to the confusion we all face in making the [...]
Clinical trials are used to both demonstrate that a drug or treatment has efficacy (extends life or improves the quality of life). They also are used as the vehicle to obtain approval from the governmental body responsible for monitoring and approving their use. How the trial is set up will directly dictate the eventual approved [...]
Today the vast majority of us have access to a computer as well as the Internet. Thanks to powerful search engines we all have easy access to the world, including to an explosion of information about our health. The fact that you are reading this blog is the best example I could offer. However, in [...]
Understanding how to best sequence and combine our new drugs to treat advanced prostate cancer includes the most discussed issue, efficacy. We want to know if a special order or a special combination of the approved drugs will nake a difference in both our quality of life (QoL) as well as how survival. Often [...]
We know that Abiraterone (Zytiga) extends life, but we also know that its side effects can be harsh, especially in elderly men (men over 75 years). We also know that men with metastatic, castrate resistant prostate cancer (mCRPC) have a limited potential life expectancy. Given these facts, it is important to know if, despite being [...]
As I have said before, the next big step in the clinical care of men with prostate cancer will be in not in the development of a new drug, but in our growing knowledge of how to sequence and combine our new drugs. Today’s post provides just one example of this new type of breakthrough [...]
Many of the posts that I have written discussed the need for evaluating our current advanced prostate cancer drugs in both combinations and their sequencing. We have a number of new drugs, but we don’t understand how best to sequence them, or whether or not some drugs would do better and extend life by taking [...]
