← Return to My husband has stage 4 metastatic prostate cancer
DiscussionMy husband has stage 4 metastatic prostate cancer
Prostate Cancer | Last Active: 3 days ago | Replies (44)Comment receiving replies
Replies to "I am de nova stage 4 Prostate Cancer metastatic in bones only. At diagnosis my PSA..."
Thanks for sharing that. That's great news!
For anyone else reading, I understand that the ALP is a bit tricky to interpret in isolation because it can rise with *any* bone distress, not just an active metastasis. Mine spiked to near the high end of normal at first, probably because of the emergency surgery on my spine to debulk the lesion (which was compressing my spinal cord), the radiation to the site, and irritation from the cement and four metal rods there now holding it together. After a year and a half my ALP came down to mid-range normal and has held there since, while my PSA has remained below 0.01 (undetectable on the ultra-sensitive test) all the way through thanks to Firmagon and Erleada (and 20 rounds of SBRT to my prostate).
So if you have low PSA and normal ALP, great! By my layperson's understanding, that means it's less likely you have any active bone metastases. But if you see the ALP rising, it could be just about anything that can irritate bones, so please don't panic (like I did, a bit), and assume it's new bone metastases. My onco team told me that as long as my PSA was that low, borderline-high ALP was extremely unlikely to be caused by new cancer activity.