Prostate Cancer

(Reuters Health) - Black men are more likely to die of prostate cancer than white men in the U.S., but a new study suggests this racial disparity may be largely due to differences in the medical care men receive. Black men are more likely to be diagnosed with prostate cancer, more apt to have advanced disease at the time of diagnosis, and more than twice as likely to die of the disease than white men in the U.S., researchers note in JAMA Oncology. African American men are also more prone to chronic illnesses like heart disease and diabetes that diminish their prostate cancer survival odds, and more likely to face financial barriers to care, the authors write. To better understand what’s behind the disparities in mortality, researchers compared outcomes for three groups with the same type of prostate cancer. Most of the men were part of a national registry of 296,273 cancer patients who didn’t receive uniform treatment or access to care. Two smaller groups of men did have the same ac...

To characterise the presenting features of those who ultimately die from prostate cancer (PCa). The study population consisted of patients in the Surveillance, Epidemiology and End Results (SEER) Program database diagnosed with PCa between 1990 and 2015. Patients were assigned to the following clinical risk groups: low-risk localised (LRL), intermediate-risk localised (IRL), high-risk localised (HRL), node-positive and metastatic (M1). Before 2004, in the absence of prostate-specific antigen (PSA) and Gleason score data, patients with cT1-T2aN0M0 and low-grade PCa were classified as LRL, those with cT3-4N0M0 or high-grade PCa were classified as HRL and all others with N0M0 disease were classified as IRL. The primary aim was to describe the risk group distribution of those who ultimately died from PCa compared with those who were diagnosed with PCa over the study period. A secondary aim was to estimate PCa-specific survival (PCSS) and evaluate the association of risk group with PCSS. ...

On Saturday, June 8, the Urology Health Foundation (UHF) will hold a free prostate cancer screening for men 40 and older from 10 a.m. until 2 p.m. at the Dallas County Health Department. According to the UHF, prostate cancer affects one in six American men and is the second leading cause of cancer death among men in the United States. According to the UHF, age and race are the strongest risk factors for prostate cancer. African-American men are at special risk for the disease, with the highest rate of prostate cancer in the world. Studies conducted by the UHF show that one in four African-American men will get prostate cancer sometime in their life and are more than twice as likely to die of the disease as white men. According to Dr. Thomas Moody, President of the UHF, there are no noticeable symptoms of prostate cancer while it is still in the early stages. If, however, a man with prostate cancer waits to act until he has symptoms, the cancer may already have grown outside the ...

[embedded content] David J. Einstein, MD, instructor of medicine at Harvard Medical School, and attending physician of medicine at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, discusses research with immunotherapy in prostate cancer. There is a lot of interest with immunotherapy in prostate cancer, specifically in patients with micrometastatic disease, says Einstein. There are several reasons why investigators believe micrometastatic disease may be particularly susceptible to this approach. Research is focused on testing vaccines and checkpoint inhibitors in the setting of biochemical recurrent premetastatic prostate cancer. Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, in conjunction with Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, is currently accruing to a trial with PROSTVAC, which is a prostate vaccine out of the National Cancer Institute. Several of Einstein’s patients are on that trial. So far, several patients have experienced prostate specific antigen (PSA) stabilization and occasional declines. Furth...

Prostate cancer (PCa) is with an estimated 174,650 new cases and 31,620 PCa-related deaths in 2019 the second most common cancer in men in the US. Standard therapies such as radical prostatectomy (RPE) and radiation therapy (RT) have high rates of undesirable side effects such as erectile impotence and urinary incontinence. Focal therapies for the treatment of PCa have been on a rise, as their minimally invasive approach can significantly reduce side effects. Many of them, including Radiofrequency Ablation, Cryoablation or Microwave Ablation, are based on thermal tissue changes. The disadvantage of these modalities is that they can unselectively damage surrounding structures, making them an elegant alternative only in cases where cancerous lesions are not close to sensitive structures. In contrast to this, Irreversible Electroporation (IRE) is an image-guided tissue ablation technology that induces cell death non-thermally via very short and strong electric pulses. IRE has preserving p...

May 28, 2019 — Engineers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute are working to improve imaging methods in order to make medicine more precise and personalized. This work will be a critical component of a new interdisciplinary research project funded with $1.4 million from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) that seeks to improve radiation therapy for high-risk prostate cancer patients. “In order to do precision medicine, you need to see better,” said Pingkun Yan, assistant professor of biomedical engineer at Rensselaer. “If you cannot see, you can’t do anything.” Yan’s expertise in imaging will support researchers from University of Texas Southwestern, led by Jing Wang, associate professor of radiation oncology , who are currently conducting a clinical trial using an approach known as stereotactic body radiation therapy (SBRT) , which delivers high doses of radiation directly to a tumor. Multiple clinical trials have shown that high doses of radiation to prostate tumors can resu...