Prostate Cancer

The American Cancer Society (ACS) today released its annual report on cancer statistics. The report showed an overall reduction in cancer mortality and a substantial drop in cervical cancer incidence. However, a concerning uptick in prostate cancer incidence and significant disparities prompted the launch of a new ACS initiative to improve prostate cancer outcomes. The report, which was published in CA: A Cancer Journal for Clinicians , is based on population-level cancer incidence and outcomes data from the National Center for Health Statistics. Overall cancer mortality showed improvement, dropping by 33% since 1991. Based on the most recent available incidence and mortality data, the report projects 1,958,310 new cancer cases and 609,820 cancer deaths in the United States in 2023. Lung, prostate, and colorectum cancers are attributed to the greatest number of deaths in men, whereas lung, breast, and colorectum cancers account for the highest number of deaths in women. The overall tre...

Skin cancer is the most common form of cancer in the entire world, and it's estimated that one in five people in the United States will develop skin cancer before they're 70. Certain factors can put you more at risk of developing skin cancer, like having fair skin, a family history of skin cancer, and lots of exposure to the sun and/or tanning beds.  We don't say this to scare you, but rather to stress the importance of routinely self-examining for signs of skin cancer and making sure you visit your dermatologist regularly. When detected in its early stages, the five-year survival rate for melanoma —the most concerning form of skin cancer—is a whopping 99%. That's nothing to snuff at. "Self-skin checks are so important. You are the first line of offense for skin cancer," says Stefani Kappel, M.D., a board-certified dermatologist based in California. "I have had patients who have performed self checks at home and then come in to se...

A secondary analysis of data from a randomized clinical trial (NCT02053389) was recently published looking at the level of concordance or discordance between physician recommendations for treatment of patients with prostate cancer. 1 In this interview, Angela Fagerlin, PhD, discusses some of the key findings and takeaways from the study, highlighting how the results point to a need for increased shared decision-making. Fagerlin is the Chair of the Department of Population Health Sciences at the University of Utah School of Medicine, Salt Lake City. Could you describe the background for this study? Back in the 1990s, there were a couple of studies showing that in survey studies where physicians would read scenarios about different patients, urologists would recommend surgery for those patients and radiation oncologists would recommend radiology for the same patient. This was published in JAMA , 2,3 and there was a little bit of an uproar about how there could be bias here and that peo...

Thursday, February 10, 2022 #178  Evaluation of quality of life data reporting in metastatic kidney cancer trials FG Bell* JC Henegan University of Mississippi, University of Mississippi, University Park, MS, US, Jackson, MS Purpose of Study Health related quality of life (HRQoL) results provide information as to the general impact on a patient's life that a therapy may have. Both statistical and clinical significance should be reported for HRQoL but not all studies present both pieces of information. We sought to identify if there is a difference in the frequency of the presentation of statistical significance of HRQoL versus clinical significance of HRQoL in phase III studies of investigational agents in metastatic renal cell carcinoma reporting longitudinal results of overall HRQoL. Methods Used A Medline search using the MESH term 'Kidney Neoplasms' and filtering for Phase III clinical trials was conducted. The articles were reviewed and those studies which incl...

Mark Socinski, MD, considers the challenges surrounding the identification of patients with early-stage non–small cell lung cancer who do not require adjuvant therapy. Citing the respective costs of adjuvant chemotherapy and immunotherapy in terms of length of treatment, financial burden, and toxicities, Dr Socinski poses circulating tumor DNA as a possible candidate for determining residual disease, and, though admitting its novel status, predicts that this and other methods in development will allow oncologists to focus treatment strategies to include only what is necessary. Medscape © 2023 WebMD, LLC Any views expressed above are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect the views of WebMD or Medscape. Cite this: Early-Stage Non–Small Cell Lung Cancer: Mitigating the Rigors of Therapy -  Medscape  - Jan 30, 2023. ...

Once widely avoided, testosterone replacement in the setting of prostate cancer has become common practice, according to Wayne J.G. Hellstrom, MD, professor of urology and chief of andrology at Tulane University School of Medicine, in New Orleans, Louisiana. "About 20 years ago, when I gave a course at the American Urological Association [AUA] and would ask if anybody in the audience would give testosterone to a man who had prostate cancer, 3 of maybe 300 to 400 urologists would put up their hands. Now, probably 75% to 80% of urologists will give testosterone to men in these circumstances," he observed. Until the past decade or so, he added, urologists were afraid of giving testosterone to men with any kind of prostate cancer for fear of "fueling the fire." Authors Huggins and Hodgkins laid the foundation for those fears in the 1940s, when they discovered that androgenetic hormones and prostate cancer were linked. Charles Brenton Huggins, who received the Nobel Priz...

Abstract The purpose of the present research was to assess the prognostic impact of marital status in hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) patients with tumors ≤ 2 cm (stage Ia) based on the data from the Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results (SEER) database. Patients who received a histopathologic HCC diagnosis between 2004 and 2016 were recruited. Overall survival (OS) was the major outcome measure. The Cox regression model and the Fine-Gray regression model were used for the purpose of comparing and examining the prognostic value of marital status for OS. The data for a total of 2446 stage Ia HCC patients were extracted from the database. The median overall survival time was 96.0 months, with 5-year and 10-year overall survival rates of 58.2% and 45.8%, respectively. In both the Fine-Gray regression model and Cox regression model, marital status [married vs. unmarried and others, both P  < 0.001, hazard ratio (HR) = 1.389 for Cox and HR = 1.378 for Fine-Gray...