I apologize for the lack of posts but I just returned from Virginia where I served as an ad hoc reviewer for U.S. Army Medical Research and Materiel Command (USAMRMC) Prostate Cancer Research Program (PCRP) aka the Congressionally Directed medical Research Program. We spent two very intensive days reviewing prostate cancer research grant applications from [...]
Expert opinion about the “three months to live” prognosis Scottish physicians gave Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al-Megrahi in August 2009. September 29, 2010 “Based on the medical report issued by the Scottish authorities, I believe that three-month prognosis was medically unjustifiable. Any physician with any training or experience in treating prostate cancer would have known that [...]
I have been asked why I spend time banging my head against the wall to try and call attention to the plight that men with advanced prostate cancer endure. My initial decision to get involved stemmed solely from both my frustration and my extreme anger that there were no support services for men with advanced [...]
Just revealed in briefing documents which were released in advance of a scheduled Thursday meeting of the FDA’s Advisory Committee for Reproductive Health Drugs, which will be considering whether to recommend denosumab for approval, are significant concerns that denosumab, the investigational biologic drug for osteoporosis, may increase risk of serious infections through its activity against [...]
November 21 is our country’s first annual Men’s Health Night. We’re asking every home to light a blue bulb that night, as a way to think about ourselves and the men we love, our sons, boyfriends, Dad’s, Uncles, Granddads, brothers, friends, partners, and husbands. One blue light bulb, one night a year, showing we care [...]
Researchers at the Department of Urology, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan evaluated the complications associated with the male bone-anchored sling (BAS) to determine the appropriate preoperative counseling for men considering surgery. The BAS is a surgical option for the treatment of stress urinary incontinence (SUI) due to intrinsic sphincter deficiency. The researchers reviewed 119 [...]
It was announced by the pharmaceutical manufacture, Amgen, that they are recalling certain lots of EPOGEN® and PROCRIT® (Epoetin alfa) The recall is prompted because the vials may contain extremely thin glass flakes (lamellae) that are barely visible. The lamellae result from the interaction of the formulation with glass vials over the shelf life of [...]
All the drugs used as 2nd line hormone therapy are only partially effective. Only some individuals respond and receive any benefit from them, but there has been some recent research into combining the drugs. At the last American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO), Dr. Eric Small, M.D. presented a abstract about his recent experimentation of [...]
Somastatin is a naturally occurring hormone that affects the levels of other hormone production in the body. Its most common drug use today is to treat giantism and acromegaley, a disease characterized by an over abundance of growth hormones. There is laboratory evidence that somastatin analogs such as octreotide acetate (Sandostatin/Sandoz) can affect the growth [...]
At some point in the progression of advanced prostate cancer the usual initial standard of care, hormone therapy (ADT2 or ADT3), will fail to control the progression of the cancer. Commonly, when ADT does fail we will experience an increase in our PSA scores and often see signs of disease progression on imaging tests. For [...]
