Why has the COVID-19 virus killed many more men than women? What does the virus have to do with male hormones? Well, quite a lot, it turns out, and a lot of what scientists now know about this male hormone (androgen)-virus interaction comes from scientists studying prostate cancer. Scientists whose research happens to have been […]
Oligometastasis: Good News from the ORIOLE Study To the growing and hopeful list of strategies for attacking prostate cancer, let us add this approach: Whack-a-Mole. That’s how Johns Hopkins radiation oncologist Phuoc Tran, M.D., Ph.D., describes it to his patients. The actual scientific name for this highly sophisticated strategy is stereotactic ablative radiotherapy (SABR, highly […]
When it comes to disrupting your life, prostate cancer cuts quite the swath. We don’t know exactly how big this trail of disruption is. We don’t know how bad it is, either. Let’s start with the numbers. In the U.S. alone, there are more than 3 million men out there who are prostate cancer survivors. […]
So, you’ve got localized prostate cancer, you’ve decided to get it treated with either surgery or radiation, and you have steeled yourself to just bite the bullet and get on with it. You’ve been through a lot already: the PSA and physical exam, the biopsy, and just coming to terms with the fact that you […]
Here we are in a global pandemic; we’re all stressed, and we all need to fight it. If you have prostate cancer, you need to fight it even harder, because the stress hormone, cortisol, may be affecting your cancer, AND because lowering your stress may help your cancer respond better to treatment. Having prostate cancer […]
You’re minding your own business and happily living your life, as most of us are when there is a diagnosis of cancer. What do you do now? For Ric Siler, an actor and writer who was diagnosed with prostate cancer at age 64, the easy answer is that he went to Italy and wrote […]
Got irritable bowel? As many as 40 percent of people who go to the doctor with gastrointestinal problems suffer from irritable bowel syndrome (alternating diarrhea and constipation); dyspepsia (uncomfortable fullness or pain in the upper abdomen, heartburn, or other digestive problems); or gastroparesis (the stomach muscles or the nerves that drive them stop working, and […]