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Biden will be here soon: Former President metastatic prostate cancer
Prostate Cancer | Last Active: 10 minutes ago | Replies (89)Comment receiving replies
The standard of not checking your PSA after 70 or 75 is not political. It is just plain wrong. It is not just a standard of checking after 70-75. It is also not checking in your 30's and 40's. I ask my son who is now 34 to get checked every year. I remember going to my doctor and him telling me that PSA blood tests give false positives and that the medical community does not want to have men's PSA checked before 40 years of age. That was garbage information. I remember that my doctors would check my testosterone and they would consistently say my free testosterone levels were dropping. Because prostate cancer cells were taking their energy from my free testosterone. I am not bitter, but I am more informed. I would not wish this disease on the worst person in the world. The only good that might come out of this is maybe more money will be available for cancer research - which will lead to more treatments and hopefully a cure. Not just prostate cancer but for all cancer types. Because right now - I do not see much progress being made for the treatment of metastatic prostate cancer. It feels like after Pluvicto treatment, approval of Nubeqa and other ARSI's for castrate sensitive prostate cancer patients, and a few additional medications used to treat men with BRAC1 and BRAC2, there has not been much progress. We need a safe medication that reverses or prevents Castrate Resistance.
Replies to "The standard of not checking your PSA after 70 or 75 is not political. It is..."
The political conspiracy theories I mentioned were speculating on so-called "coverups" in President Biden's medical history. This forum isn't the place for partisan political bickering (there's plenty of that in social media like Twitter-X and Facebook, if people feel the need).
On the other hand, the reduction in PSA screening and subsequent surge in de-novo cases of metastatic prostate cancer are, as you rightly mention, documented facts that have affected many of us here in the forum. 😢
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Yes, the advances in treating metastatic prostate cancer are many small tweaks instead of a big breakthrough:
- recognising oligometastatic cancer as a distinct category and treating with curative intent
- radiating the prostate and (for oligometastatic) each of the metastases
- for polymetastatic, hitting the cancer with triplet therapy (including chemo) up front instead using just one treatment until it fails then progressing to the next
- using one of the -lutamides together with ADT right from the start instead of waiting for castrate-resistance
- using Pluvicto to radiate polymetastatic prostate cancer
No one of these changes alone is a silver bullet, but together they've brought us from expecting to live just just a few years to studies no longer lasting long enough to reach median overall survival (e.g. well over half of participants are still alive after 5–7 years, and a good number still have had little or no progression in that time).
All these little tweaks aren't as exciting as a big dramatic breakthrough, but in combination they've massively changed the survival prospects for many (not all) with metastatic prostate cancer during the past 5–10 years.
Unfortunately, you might not yet get this newer standard of care outside of a major cancer research centre. It depends on whether your local urologist is keeping up on the literature, or still doing the same things they were doing in 2015 or 2020. 😕