You Can Survive Aggressive Prostate Cancer With Hormone Therapy And Radiation – New Study Says

Like we always say in this Prostate Cancer Website, more and more studies are being done on an almost daily basis to provide more solutions and better research for surviving prostate cancer. We owe the many researchers a lot for the awesome findings they come up with; many helping to save lots of lives from the scourge of this cancer.

One of such researches/studies has just indicated that those men who have had their cancers spread out of their prostate to other surrounding tissues (thus have aggressive prostate cancer) can now live much longer than previously thought, if they are treated using a combination of hormone therapy and radiation.

Read more about this in the below news article:

Men with prostate cancer that has spread to local surrounding tissues live longer and are less likely to die of the high-risk disease if treated with a combination of radiation and hormone therapy, rather than with the drug treatment alone, a study has found.

The finding could change the standard for treating this aggressive form of prostate cancer, which represents about one in five cases of the disease, said Dr. Padraig Warde, a radiation oncologist at Princess Margaret Hospital in Toronto who led the international study.

“The study shows combining radiation and hormone therapy improves overall survival by 23 per cent and disease-specific survival by 43 per cent, compared with treating with hormone therapy alone,” said Warde.

To conduct the study, 1,205 men with locally advanced prostate cancer in Canada, the U.S. and the U.K. were randomly divided into two groups. Half received androgen-deprivation therapy to suppress testosterone production, while the other half were treated with the hormone therapy plus radiation.

After seven years, 66 per cent of men who had the hormone therapy alone were still alive, compared with 74 per cent who received the combination treatment. Among those in the hormone treatment-only group, 26 per cent died from their prostate cancer, compared with 10 per cent who received both therapies.

“The two of them together combined are the important thing,” said Warde. “You can’t use radiation alone. What it’s showing is that radiation plus hormones are better than hormones alone.”

Androgen deprivation therapy, given by intramuscular injection, works by starving prostate cancer cells of testosterone, which they need to multiply. The treatment also makes cancer cells more sensitive to the killing effects of radiation, Warde explained.

This year, an estimated 25,500 men in Canada will be diagnosed with cancer of the walnut-sided gland, and about 4,100 will die of the disease. About 15 to 20 per cent of cases are the aggressive or high-risk type with localized spread.

“And these are the bad actors,” said Warde of this form of the cancer. “These are the patients, if you look overall, who die of prostate cancer, whereas many of the people who present with earlier-stage disease, they actually will live very long even with or without treatment. They don’t die of prostate cancer — they die with it.

“But with these ones, a lot of the patients will die of prostate cancer.”

The study is published in the Nov. 2 issue of The Lancet, and Warde believes its findings will alter the practice of using just hormone therapy for locally advanced prostate cancer.

“There is substantial evidence that many, many patients … are treated with hormone therapy alone and are never referred for consideration of (radiation) treatment,” he said. “So they’re never given the chance of cure because with locally advanced disease, many urologists in particular — although I’m not picking on them — believed that this is incurable cancer and there was really no point in giving them additional treatment beyond hormones.”

The international research team enrolled and treated patients over 10 years beginning in 1995, and Warde said the radiation therapy used was typically “old-style” — employing lower doses of radiation in less finely targeted beams, compared with treatment today.

“So, in fact, there’s every reason to believe that with the radiation we use now … that the results are likely to be much better because we hopefully kill more cancer cells with the radiation and we’re much more precise now,” he said.

Some side-effects can occur, however, including damage to surrounding tissues like the rectum and bladder, which can cause tenderness, some bleeding and diarrhea. Warde said these effects are most pronounced in the first six to 12 months on average, but don’t seem to persist beyond three years following treatment.

Still, he believes that adding the radiation component will lead to a better outcome for many patients.

“It’s practice-changing in that we will be getting out to patients, physicians across North America and Europe … that actually these patients should no longer be treated with hormone therapy alone. They should be referred for consideration of radiation, and hopefully many of them will benefit and live longer and more productive lives.”

Dr. Martin Gleave, director of the Vancouver Prostate Centre, does not see the study so much as a “game-changer,” but a confirmation of what cancer specialists have surmised for some time.

“The fact that adding radiation helps survival affirms our biases,” Gleave, a professor of urology at the University of British Columbia, said from Vancouver. “But on top of that, I think it will lead us in the future towards being more aggressive in managing the local disease.”

“Where we would have thought, or at least hypothesized, that maybe the horse is out of the barn and closing the barn door doesn’t make a difference … (the study suggests that) closing the barn door and preventing more horses from getting out does make a difference,” he said of the double-barrelled treatment to halt the migration of cancer cells.

Gleave said more aggressive treatment could mean using chemotherapy along with hormone-suppression and radiation, a triple combination that Warde’s team has already begun testing. Surgery might also be included in such a treatment regimen, Gleave added. Read more.

As you can see from the above news article, it’s never too late to give up, even if you have aggressive or end stage prostate cancer.

There’s always hope, like we like to say on this website… so you should always be POSITIVE while looking for how to survive prostate cancer!

Post Prostate Cancer Surgery Orgasms – Orgasming After Prostatectomy

It is a bleak thought for most people when they consider life after prostatectomy. No longer much of a secret at this time, most men in the United States are fully aware that their sexual life is compromised by the surgical procedure to remove the prostate gland, during which the nerves that control erection are damaged in some way, most times irreparably. A concern that they generally have also is if they would ever again be able to father a child…

For the record, after a radical prostatectomy, the entire prostate is gone, meaning that no more prostate fluid is being produced. The prostate fluid is the substance produced by this organ which makes up most of the liquid part of the semen that is discharged during sexual orgasm. The sensory neurons in the region are still intact, as a matter of fact, so that penile sensation has not gone anywhere; contrary to certain popular beliefs, the ability to achieve an orgasm has not gone anywhere either. What has suffered is the ability to achieve an erection, and yes, painfully the ability to ejaculate. With the prostate fluid out of the way, there isn’t much to carry the sperm on their way out from the testicles – if the testicles are still in position and not removed for some form of hormonal therapy… 

Post prostate cancer surgery orgasms, according to reports by those who have experienced it – and still are experiencing it – are some of the most intense experiences that a man may ever go through. The strength and concentration of the experience may fade with frequency after the first occurrence, but they generally seem to remain a lot more forceful than previous ones before the operation, if reports are to be believed.

Most men certainly desire the pleasure of the seeing the creamy white ejaculate springing out of the penis at the time that they orgasm, but that is not likely to be. There of course is the lubrication fluid from the cowper’s glands that generally comes before the act of sexual intercourse, and may in certain cases be sustained through to the end of the copulation, but it generally is nowhere near the quality of good old fashioned semen.

In order to achieve an erection in this phase of a man’s life, he may have to rely heavily on little blue pills Viagra, of Levitra, or Cialis. VED vacuum pumps also help a great deal, although they will have to be helped by a cord to band tied around the base of the penis to keep the blood from flowing back out. Otherwise, the man may go with the penile injections option to achieve a semblance of potency. But as for the ejaculate at orgasm, if it is prolonged or anything of that sort, it is likely just urine from the bladder.

Prostate Cancer Prognosis – Life Expectancy for Patients

Prostate cancer prognosis generally varies from person to person, and may be affected by the type of Prostate Cancer Treatment that is administered to the patient, as well as the general state of health that the patient is as at the time of commencement of the therapy.

The most important factor however in determining what the chances of survival are for a man who has just been diagnosed with prostate cancer is the stage of the cancer as at the time of diagnosis. This is partly why so much effort is placed on staging the Prostate Cancer disease; so that they can know how far the disease has spread (or metastasized) in the body of the patient, and thus decide on treatment while also having an idea of how well the patient might respond over the course of the intervention.

Early stage prostate cancer is not only treatable, but it is also curable, to the extent that there are excellent five year outcomes of patients treated with radical prostatectomy – prostate cancer surgery – or early stage radiation therapy.

According to the American Cancer Society, the survival rate for men treated for early stage disease at five years is almost a hundred percent; at then years also, it still stands at an impressive 93%, and at fifteen years it drops to 77%, which is not too bad considering that the man will likely be well stricken with age at this time anyhow.

The story with late stage disease is a different matter altogether. Perhaps the biggest matter to realize first and foremost is that advanced stage prostate cancer is not really so curable – it is treatable, but it cannot be really cured – so whatever treatments are ordered by the oncologist or urologist will likely be to provide palliative care to the said patient, and little else.

Rarely are advanced stage prostate cancer patients expected to live longer than three years, although that also is determined by how aggressive the cancer is, how extensively it has metastasized through the body, and how well the patient responds to therapy. There are actually men who have lived as long as eight years after the diagnosis and with proper care before eventually dying – and there are those (very few) who have lived even further than that, although the doctors would hardly acknowledge them, putting them down as anomalous instances, exceptions that prove the rule.

It might be possible to further extend life expectancy for such a patient, say certain published research reports, but that has not been confirmed. According to this finding, prostatectomy can double or even triple the survival rate for advanced prostate cancer, but as said, this claim is yet being studied and may take a few years before it becomes founded… or not. In the meantime, men with advanced prostate cancer may only look forward to… er, five years?

« Previous Page — Next Page »