Why does PSA continue to rise and prostate cancer disease continue to progress (new tumors develop and existing tumors continue to get bigger) when a man has an immune system treatment to go after their prostate cancer? This issue is probably the major marketing hurdle faced by Dendreon’s Provenge and based on the current statistics [...]
Having your advanced prostate cancer progress to becoming castrate resistant is a major moment in our life. For many of us becoming castrate resistant signals a major change, a foreshadowing of what the future holds. Becoming castrate resistant heralds our eventual decline which can only lead us to one destination, our demise. How long it [...]
All of us in the prostate cancer world know that the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force (USPTF) has announced its recommendation against routine PSA screening for men. There remains much debate and unhappiness in both the medical community (urologists and oncologists) as well as in the prostate cancer community itself. There remains a lot of [...]
Not in the normal realm of advanced prostate cancer, but important for the prostate cancer world is the news that the FDA has approved a new screening test for prostate cancer. The currently used screening tool, the PSA has only a 55% accuracy rate and as recently run into serious trouble with The U.S. Preventive [...]
There has been an on-going debate on the advanced prostate cancer on-line support group about the issue of the efficacy of Provenge in light of the expectation of a person's increasing PSA number while getting the treatment. For many men with advanced prostate cancer this is a reason they elect to pass on this treatment [...]
Today, the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force (USPSTF) posted its prostate cancer screening final recommendation statement. The following letter was received by anyone who posted a public comment: The USPSTF is committed to making the recommendations process clear and transparent and we are able to achieve that by keeping the public fully informed throughout the [...]
Today, May 16, 2012, Dendreon, the makers of Provenge, disclosed a new analysis of data of its pivotal 512-patient study of men with castrate resistant prostate cancer who received sipuleucel-T (Provenge). The new analysis separated the men in the study into four quartiles based on their prostate-specific antigen (PSA) scores. The initial design of the [...]
The use of the PSA as a prostate cancer screening tool has been a controversial issue for many years. Within the last year the issue has again come to the forefront of the public awareness, especially because of the recent move of the U.S Preventative Task Force to discourage using the PSA as a screening [...]
One of the major causes of prostate cancer morbidity and mortality is bone metastases. Currently, when it comes to treating prostate cancer metastases we are very limited in effective therapies that actually prolong survival. Kirschenbaum A, etal (Departments of Urology and Medicine Division of Pulmonary Diseases Division of Endocrinology, Metabolism, and Bone Diseases, Mount Sinai [...]
The researchers took a cohort of 430 men with a biochemical recurrence (PSA increase only) after failed prostatectomy. The men underwent observation until they experienced metastatic disease as determined by CT or bone scan. The researchers then evaluated the PSA at the time the men developed metastasis for those patients who developed metastatic disease. PSA [...]
