blood draw yesterday

...but not for PSA.  That will be next month.  Yesterday the blood draw was a comprehensive metabolic panel, cholesterol, etc.  I expect my cholesterol numbers to be excellent again, given the Pravastatin and weight loss, and I'm curious about what my white blood cell count will be.  It was low last time, and my doctor was concerned. Specifically, my neutrophil count was low. But since I wasn't having trouble fighting off infections, he didn't refer me to a hematologist.  I still am very healthy in that regard--no problem with infections of any kind.

Weight and Risk

Overweight men who had prostatectomies, saw their PSA rise, and then were put on hormone therapy (aka ADT) were three times more likely to see their cancer spread. Obese men had five times the risk.

"Obesity May Raise Risk of Prostate Cancer Spread"

Several months ago I was overweight, and on my way to becoming obese, but I've shed 40 lbs. with Weight Watchers and now have a normal BMI. My blood pressure and cholesterol have improved as well. And if my cancer comes back, it sure looks like it would be better to have a healthy weight.

 

My weight since joining Weight Watchers. 

 

 My blood pressure and heart rate trend over time as a result of losing weight and exercising.

De-stress with chess

I still find online chess a great way to get my mind off the worries of the day, including cancer.

Martin receiving radiotherapy for prostate cancer

This is very similar to my experience. The video is sped-up, otherwise you'd be bored to tears. As you can see the treatments themselves are very easy on the patient. Over time, side effects may build up, but an IMRT treatment is about the easiest thing you can undergo medically.

Latest Salvage Radiation News

Researchers in Munich, Germany, studied 96 men at a single institution, and found that--as did earlier research done by William Catalona and others--that although most men show a significant drop in PSA after SRT, in the long run, most will see their PSA start to rise.  In this case, 35% remained free of PSA progression at 5 years post-SRT.

Outcome After Conformal Salvage Radiotherapy in Patients With Rising Prostate-Specific Antigen Levels After Radical Prostatectomy.

Klinikum rechts der Isar der Technischen Universität München

 

 

 

Clinical Trials

This was in an issue of the New York Times this week.  It's sort of an op-ed advertisement for Mt. Sinai hospital.   The authors call for increased funding for clinical trials for breast cancer.

Clinical trials are a crucial part of all cancer research.  I'm reading The Emperor of All Maladies: a Biography of Cancer by Siddhartha Mukherjee right now (highly recommended, by the way) and just happen to be on the part that describes how clinical trials for cancer came to be.  He opens with a quote by H.J. Koning: "Randomised screening trials are bothersome.  It takes ages to come to an answer, and these need to be large-scale projects to be able to answer the questions.  [But...] there is no second-best option."



Indeed, many cancer trials never get off the ground because they lack participants.

Encouraging New Study on Salvage Radiation

Varian linear accelerator.  

The March 2011 issue of Cancer, a journal from the American Cancer Society, carried promising news for all of us SRT (salvage radiotherapy) guys:  salvage radiation has been shown, for the first time, to confer a survival benefit across the patient population, and PSA doubling time did not matter significantly.   Some well-known doctors (D'Amico and Moul, for example) from Harvard and Dana Farber co-authored the study which looked at 519 men who had prostatectomies at Duke University between 1988 and 2008.  The median followup time was 11.3 years.  The way I understand hazard ratios, the results mean that the risk of death from all causes was roughly half that of men who did not have salvage radiation. 


http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21437885?s_cid=pubmed






















Photo courtesy digital cat: http://www.flickr.com/photos/14646075@N03/3798458685/. Used under Creative Commons license with thanks.