Mentioned Prostate Cancer on Monday Night Football

@surftohealth88 I think it gets back to the "two prostate cancers" thing. Many people — even patients — know only about the slow developing kind, the one that you find out about in your late 60s, 70s, or 80s, is often borderline, and that you're more likely to die with than of.

What's less understood is the fast-developing kind of prostate cancer, the one you often find out about before 60, and spreads so fast that it may already have metastasised by the time you first know of it. It's the type that killed famous people like Johnny Ramone and Frank Zappa at a very young age, but fortunately, over the past 10 years or so, they've developed new practices and treatments for people like your husband and me, and they *may* be able to keep us alive indefinitely (we're the guinea-pig generation, but signs so far are promising).

@northoftheborder Fortunately, those “fast-developing kind of prostate cancers” are rare,

Also, there’s no way to know whether Johnny Ramone and Frank Zappa (and others) had been getting regular PSA screening for many years and their “fast-developing kind of prostate cancers” suddenly occurred or whether they didn’t seek medical care until the prostate cancer was already symptomatic, advanced, and then progressed quickly once diagnosed.

It’s mostly about early and annual screening which can lead to early detection.

@brianjarvis Not that rare. When I was first diagnosed, my oncologist told me the aggressive variety accounts for about 1 in 20 cases, and given how many people have prostate cancer, that's a lot of cases.

This forum isn't a random selection (people with the more-aggressive type of prostate cancer are more likely to land here and stay longer), but we get a good number of introductory posts from people diagnosed with de-novo prostate cancer in our 50s and even 40s.

You and I agree that annual PSA screening is important — study after study has shown a steep rise in de-novo stage 4 prostate-cancer diagnoses since routine PSA screening stopped in most countries — but it's not a guarantee. As one research paper I read pointed out, sometimes the aggressive variety of prostate cancer develops so fast that you have normal PSA one year, and already have metastatic cancer by the next. In fact, that had happened to one of my hospital roommates (in his 50s): as a Canadian army vet, he had still been getting annual PSA screening, but it wasn't fast enough to catch his cancer before it metastasised. 😕