Making treatment decisions once you have been diagnosed with prostate cancer is difficult. Often, it is impossible to accurately and reliably be able to predict the eventual course of the cancer. Prostate cancer, besides being one of the slower growing cancers, is also one of the deadliest. So good, informed decisions are vital. The original [...]
Periodically, some of the men in one of my support groups get locked into what they see as the importance of monitoring their C-reactive protein (CRP) serum levels to be able to predict their chances of having a Bio-Chemical Recurrence (BCR) (PSA only). The CRP measures levels of inflammation and we know that inflammation and [...]
It is generally accepted that a complete biochemical response (BR) of a man’s PSA immediately after surgery is an indicator of optimal cancer control. Does this also hold true for men with lymph node invasion (LNI)? Researchers performed a single institution study of 319 men with prostate cancer and LNI who were treated with surgery [...]
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 [...]
Today most doctors rely on their personal evaluation or objective response criteria (OR) of a man to know when docetaxel chemotherapy has stopped working. The earlier this determination can be accurately made the quicker an alternative treatment can e put into place. Personal evaluations without any validated tools are unreliable and never consistent among doctors. [...]
Hormone therapy or Primary androgen deprivation therapy (PADT) is the usual first “go to” therapy for men when they are diagnosed with metastatic prostate cancer whether it is a primary diagnosis or the result of a recurrence. The natural progression of the disease is to become unresponsive to the treatment (castrate resistant) leading to a [...]
There are occasional conversations about the possibility of looking at a man’s fingers and predicting the aggressiveness of their prostate cancer. Is this real science or is this voodoo science? This might actually be real science! During gestation a male fetus’s development of the prostate gland is dependent on a functional androgen receptor and the [...]
