Howard Waage ---- Editor
Where: Our meeting will be in the Bennett & Suzy Katz Cancer Resource Center on the 1st Floor of the
two-story redwood Education Building behind Santa Cruz Dominican Hospital.
When: Tuesday, August 25th, 2009 7:00 PM. For more information: Please call the Bennett
and Suzy Katz Cancer Resource Center at Dominican Hospital (831) 462-7770
Please feel free to contact any of the following steering committee members if you would like to volunteer or if you have any suggestions or questions.
Joe Ferrara 426-7724 Frank and Janet Schmetz 438 4781 Bill McDermott 423-8350 Howard Waage 688-0423
Michael & Julie Batz 724-2701 Tim Ryan 476-6550 Ron Locey 214-4338
Our website: http://www.scprostate.org Webmaster: Paul Johnson
Thursday, September 3rd, 2009, from 5:00 to 6:45 P.M. LOCATION: Meeting Room C, (Ground Floor across from the Cafeteria), El Camino Hospital, 2500 Grant Road, Mountain View, CA 94040. ---From the main entrance, proceed straight to the elevators, go down one level to the ground floor, and turn right after exiting to the elevators. The Meeting Room C is at the end of the hallway.--- You are encouraged to bring your spouse or partner to the meeting. You may bring something to eat during the meeting or buy food in the cafeteria.
Monday, July 27 (HealthDay News) -- A major study has good news for men who have prostate cancer surgery but leaves unanswered the complicated question of whether a man should have that operation, another treatment or just watchful waiting. The study of almost 13,000 American men who had a radical prostatectomy -- surgical removal of a cancerous prostate gland -- between 1987 and 2005 found that only 12 percent of them died of the cancer, according to the report in the July 27 issue of the Journal of Clinical Oncology.
"Patients with what we thought of as high-risk prostate cancer had a much lower risk of dying of their cancers than we ever thought," said Dr. Peter T. Scardino, chairman of the department of surgery at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, and a member of the research team. "Patients with more favorable prostate cancers did remarkably well, so well that you have to begin to question whether they should have been treated."
The choice of surgery, radiation therapy or watchful waiting must be made each year for more than 190,000 American men, most middle-aged or older, who are diagnosed with prostate cancer. Most choose some kind of treatment, said Dr. Andrew Stephenson, head of urological oncology at the Cleveland Clinic's Glickman Urological and Kidney Institute, and another member of the research team. From 40 percent to 50 percent choose surgery, about 10 percent choose watchful waiting, and the rest choose some form of radiation therapy, Stephenson said.
For men who have surgery, the new research has produced a tool that can allow them to predict their chance of survival for at least 15 years, Scardino said. Survival is measured by essentially three elements: the clinical stage of the cancer when it is detected, determined in great part by how large it is; the Gleason score, a measure of how much of its normal structure the prostate gland has lost; and blood levels of PSA, a protein produced by the gland.
The study found that the score had an accuracy of 82 percent in predicting 15-year survival, Scardino said. "If you could predict what would happen in the stock market in the next 15 years with 82 percent accuracy, you would be a genius," he said.
Overall, there was a greater chance that a man in the study would die of a cause other than prostate cancer. The rate of death from other causes was 38 percent, compared to 12 percent attributed to prostate cancer.
The new predictive method will be made public soon, after medical review, so that physicians and men can learn about their anticipated survival after surgery, Scardino said. "Any person can look at it and put in the numbers," he said. The new predictive tool is an improvement over the existing method, which relies essentially on readings of prostate- specific antigen levels, Stephenson said. But no such predictive method exists for newly diagnosed men who must chose between treatment and watchful waiting, and so the study presents a predicament for those men and their physicians, he said.
"It questions the lethality of prostate cancer," Stephenson said. "Perhaps a similarly low risk might have been seen if the men did not have prostatectomy. We can't say whether a cancer poses enough of a threat to the patient so that therapy is needed." Prostate cancer surgery is not free of problems, Stephenson said. Its major side effects are incontinence and loss of sexual function.
Many prostate cancers grow slowly -- so slowly that an old medical byword is that "more men die with their prostate cancer than of it." No existing method can single out the cancers that will be fatal if left untreated. "We really need better tools for really identifying prostate cancers that pose a threat to longevity," Stephenson said. "Many have been proposed. All are being investigated, and hopefully in the future we will have better tools that accurately predict the risk of dying from prostate cancer." Until those tools are available, the question is often "a balance between quantity and quality of life," he added. "That is a very complicated decision that must take many factors into consideration." Source: http://news.yahoo.com
Wednesday, July 8 (HealthDay News) -- Doctors don't have to be so cautious in prescribing the drug finasteride to men at risk for prostate cancer, a new study suggests.
Physicians face a dilemma when trying to decide whether to use the drug, which has been shown to prevent prostate cancer in about one in five men who take it. However, findings from the Prostate Cancer Prevention Trial published in 2003 concluded that men who developed prostate cancer while taking finasteride were 25 percent more likely to develop an aggressive form of the disease.
But a new study from the Stanford University School of Medicine suggests that the drug does not increase the risk for aggressive prostate cancer but simply makes it easier to diagnose. The study appears in the July 7 issue of Clinical Cancer Research.
The Stanford team suspected a flaw in the analysis of data in the 2003 study, rather than a problem with the drug. To test this theory, they analyzed data on 1,304 men who'd had an abnormal digital rectal exam or high PSA test results and had been referred to Stanford. None of the men was taking finasteride. Prostate cancer was eventually diagnosed in nearly 500 of the men, including 247 who had aggressive, high-grade cancer.
Finasteride shrinks the prostate, making malignancies easier to detect, the researchers said. And the smaller the prostate, the more likely a biopsy would yield a diagnosis of high-grade cancer, they said, and the more likely a high PSA level would predict the disease. For example, the diagnostic rate for one level of high-grade cancer was 29.7 percent in men with prostates between 20 to 29.9 cubic centimeters, compared with 6.5 percent for men with prostates larger than 80 cubic centimeters.
"We're showing that this is all related to size" of the prostate, Dr. Joseph Presti Jr., a research professor in urology and director of the urologic oncology program at Stanford, said in a news release from the university.
The authors of the 2003 study reached similar conclusions after they analyzed their own results, according to Catherine Tangen, statistical principal investigator for the first study. The findings of the new study "are consistent with everything we found," Tangen said in the news release. Men should be given the opportunity to take finasteride if they and their doctors feel it's necessary, she added. Source: http://www.prostatecancerfoundation.org
Monday, July 13 (HealthDay News) -- Heavy drinking, especially when it's beer, increases the risk for highly aggressive prostate cancer, a new study finds. The researchers did not set out to determine the effect of alcohol consumption on prostate cancer risk but rather to test the effectiveness of finasteride (Proscar, Propecia), a drug prescribed to prevent prostate cancer.
And they found that heavy drinking reduces the cancer-preventing effect of finasteride. But the researchers did not stop there. "Within the data in that trial, we could address a large number of questions," said Alan R. Kristal, associate head of the cancer prevention program at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center and an author of a report on the study published online July 13 in Cancer.
One question was the possible relationship between alcohol consumption and prostate cancer risk. The study, which included more than 10,000 men, found that those who drank heavily -- 50 grams (1.7 ounces) of pure alcohol a day, the amount in four shots of hard liquor, five or more days a week -- were more than twice as likely as less heavy drinkers to develop what is called high-grade prostate cancer. There was no difference in prostate cancer risk between nondrinkers and those who drank moderately.
"The majority of [prostate] cancers are low-grade," explained Kristal, who is also a professor of epidemiology at the University of Washington. "They grow very slowly, and 100 percent of men with it live for 10 years. Most men die of something else. With high-grade prostate cancer, survival at 10 years is only 60 to 70 percent."Most heavy drinkers in the study drank beer, Kristal said. "They are six-pack-a-day drinkers," he said. "But there is no logical reason to think there is anything special about beer that increases the risk that does not apply to other forms of alcohol."
True, said Dr. Len Lichtenfeld, deputy chief medical officer of the American Cancer Society. The number of men in the study was too small to establish a relationship between prostate cancer and overall alcohol consumption, he said, but the finding might be enough to put prostate cancer on the list of malignancies that are affected by alcohol intake. "Certain cancers are commonly associated with alcohol -- head and neck cancer, esophageal cancer, breast cancer," Lichtenfeld said. "Similar consistent information in regard to prostate cancer and alcohol really doesn't exist. But this was a well-defined and carefully developed study, an excellent opportunity to help answer that question."
The study provides "what is probably the best information we have on the possible relationship," Lichtenfeld said. "And one of the take-away messages we have is that drinking a lot of alcohol is a risk factor for developing aggressive prostate cancer." It's not possible, Lichtenfeld said, to say anything about heavy drinking of wine and hard liquor because of the small number of such drinkers in the study. But people who drink equivalent amounts of alcohol in wine or hard liquor should not take comfort from that lack of statistical significance, he said.
"To reduce the risk of prostate cancer, it is best for you to reduce your intake of large amounts of alcohol," he said. Source: http://www.prostatecancerfoundation.org
April 27, 2009 -- Cholesterol-lowering drugs called statins that are a major weapon against cardiovascular disease may also protect men against prostate cancer and other urological problems, new research suggests.
In a study involving 2,447 men who were followed for 14 years, those taking statins were two to three times less likely to be diagnosed with prostate cancer compared with those who weren't taking the medicines. The longer they were taking the medicines, the lower their risk of the cancer. The men were similarly less likely to have a biopsy to test for prostate tumors or to have elevated levels of PSA, a marker for increased risk of the disease.
The findings were presented Sunday at the meeting of the American Urological Association here. Researchers from the Mayo Clinic, Rochester, Minn., who conducted the study, said the results were intriguing, but they cautioned that they are from an observational study and not robust enough to recommend statin therapy to aid in prevention of prostate cancer. That would take a large and prolonged randomized trial.
Statins, including Lipitor, above, are taken to lower cholesterol. In a study, men who took statins were also less likely to be diagnosed with prostate cancer. "It was a fairly substantial lower risk," said Jennifer St. Sauver, an epidemiologist at Mayo and one of the investigators on the study. "If men are already taking statins for something else, maybe they are getting another benefit as well."
Statins, which include Pfizer Inc.'s Lipitor, AstraZeneca PLC's Crestor and several generics, are among the pharmaceutical industry's top-selling medicines. They have been shown in numerous major studies to reduce risk of death, heart attacks, strokes and other consequences of cardiovascular disease. Possible side effects include muscle pain that leaves some patients unable to take the drugs.
In three presentations Sunday, Mayo researchers reported that 38, or 5%, of 729 men who were taking statins during the study were diagnosed with prostate cancer, compared with 186, or 11%, of 1,718 men not using statins; 11% of statin takers and 25% of those not taking statins had a biopsy to test for the presence of tumors.
The researchers also found that men taking statins were less likely to have benign enlargement of the prostate, a non-cancerous condition that can make urination painful or difficult, or to suffer from erectile dysfunction. Whether lower cholesterol levels are associated with the reduced risk hasn't been determined yet, researchers said.
In addition to their cholesterol-lowering effects, statins have been shown to reduce inflammation -- a possible reason for their effect on prostate-cancer risk. Source: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124071529612156433.html
The Santa Cruz County Prostate Cancer Support Group maintains quite a number of up to date books and videos about prostate cancer, prevention, diagnosis and treatment options. Anyone interested in doing research or needs information about this disease may check out materials.
The Katz Cancer Resource Center is in the Dominican Hospital Education Building, 1555 Soquel Drive, Santa Cruz, CA. Open 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. Monday through Thursday 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. Friday, or by appointment at 831 462 7770.
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The Santa Cruz County Prostate Cancer Support Group does not endorse any provider, organization, product or individual. All medical decisions should be made with the advice and consultation of medical professionals.
Many THANKS to the American Cancer Society for assisting with the printing and mailing of this newsletter and the Katz Cancer Resource Center for allowing us to use their facility.
Many THANKS to Century 21 Classic Properties in Watsonville for their donations raised for our support group and presented to the Steering Committee at the July meeting.