In case you’re interested, the Prostate Cancer Research Institute is hosting its mid-year update tomorrow, Saturday, 29 March 2025 from 8:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m., PDT (Los Angeles time). You can learn more about it here:
Here’s another informative video from the Prostate Cancer Research Institute with answers to many questions about hormone therapy. They have taken questions or comments from previous videos and provided answers.
If you don’t want to sit through the full 30 minutes, there are time stamps for each topic in the description of the video.
Save the dates! Two of the heavy-hitter organizations in the world of prostate cancer will be holding online seminars in the weeks ahead. You may want to check them out.
2022 Prostate Cancer Patient Conference – The Prostate Cancer Research Institute
The Prostate Cancer Research Institute is a great source of information for those diagnosed with prostate cancer. Each year, they hold a Prostate Cancer Patient Conference, and this year’s conference is scheduled Saturday and Sunday, 10–11 September 2022. You can sign up for free and you may also submit any questions that you have.
Their agenda still has some gaps to fill as I write this, but I’m sure more will be known by the time the conference begins. All times are in Pacific Daylight Saving Time (Los Angeles), and you can join by Zoom from anywhere.
The Prostate Cancer Foundation is launching a new webinar series with its first session being held 4:30 p.m.–5:30 p.m. PDT (Los Angeles), Tuesday, 20 September 2022.
The topics for the first session are “Prostate 8: Simple Lifestyle Changes That Work” and “Mental Health and Prostate Cancer.”
I had seen the term bantered about in one of the online support groups that I participate in, and one of the members posted a link to a video [below] put together by the Prostate Cancer Research Institute featuring Dr. Eugene Kwon from the Mayo Clinic. While this may be old news to some, it was new to me, and it was definitely worth the 29 minutes to watch—I learned a lot.
First, oligo means scant or few, and when cancer metastasizes, it doesn’t metastasize throughout your entire body all at once. It’s not like throwing the switch on the national Christmas tree so your whole body lights up in a scan. It starts small and spreads from there. The hypothesis is that, if you treat those early oligometastatic locations, you are much more likely to have a successful outcome. As Dr. Kwon says, it’s a lot easier to kill something small than it is to kill multiple resistant larger tumors.
Second, imaging technology has now advanced to the point where those oligometastatic sites can be identified for treatment. Interestingly, in Dr. Kwon’s experience, only 30% of the cancer that comes back is found locally in the prostate bed. To me, that is hugely important. (For the remaining cancer, 54% is distant metastases and, in 16% of the cases, the metastases are both distant and local.)
The current standard of care is to start salvage radiation therapy (SRT) without the benefit of advanced imaging, zapping the crap out of the prostate bed, with an apparent seven in ten chance that it won’t be effective. And, as an added bonus, you get those potential life-long side effects from the radiation.
Of course, after (or in conjunction with) SRT is androgen deprivation therapy (ADT). It’s palliative in nature and only prolongs life with even more side effects.
Dr. Kwon asserts that, if you go after those early oligometastatic sites—surgically removing “hot” lymph nodes or spot-radiating affected bones—those treatments can be more curative in nature. Curative is certainly better than palliative.
You can rest assured that I’ll be investigating more of this in the future and discussing it with my doctor in April.
Dan's Journey through Prostate Cancer 