This patient says that they've seen some of our videos and
that they have a very optimistic take on prostate cancer patients,
but this person also sees that prostate cancer is one of the leading cause of death in men.
Great question. The issue, of course now in this modern era, if people are screened carefully—if
they get regular PSA testing—and if they do come down with a type of prostate cancer
that could be life-threatening, almost all of them are going to end up getting cured,
and so we certainly should be optimistic about that. There are occasional rare
newly diagnosed men where it all sneaks through and the cancer sneaks through all the things we
put in front of it, and then over another 10, 15, 20 years later the person is facing early demise,
and of course, that's a sad and real thing that happens. That's pretty uncommon. The main problem,
of course, is that some men don't get screening and by the time their cancer is diagnosed it's
already spread around the body and those people can die within 3 to 12, 15 years something like
that, and that's far more serious. Nowhere near as serious as say something like a pancreas or a lung
cancer where people can be dead within six months easily. We need to be optimistic in most cases;
more optimistic than what people typically are thinking, and if people will do adequate homework
and find out where they fit in the spectrum of all these things that I just described they'll
realize they definitely want to be optimistic, but there are certain situations where people
do die of prostate cancer that's very serious. Thankfully, it's getting to be less and less
and it's certainly a relatively small minority of men of the number of men who have prostate cancer.
So, our next patient asks if two and a half years of survival benefit from
adding chemotherapy to hormone therapy and a second generation anti-androgen,
is it anything to be excited about? I'd be more interested if it was 10 or 15 years.
Well it's an interesting way of looking at it because the chemotherapy for prostate cancer,
Taxotere, is the mainstay and this is what they're referring to. There are clinical trials
that look at newly diagnosed men with metastatic cancer whether they have hormone therapy alone,
hormone therapy plus second-generation hormone therapy, or hormone therapy plus second-generation
plus chemotherapy or Taxotere. Studies are showing the combination of all three can add a couple—more
than two years—to your life expectancy. Yeah, it would be more exciting if it was 15 years,
but two years is there's a very substantial amount of time considering that the Taxotere
is a fairly mild medicine it doesn't impact the quality of life in in a seriously negative way.
So, why not? I mean, if it's the best we can do, why wouldn't we want to grab those two years, and
you might even get lucky. So, who knows when the next big breakthrough is going to be discovered,
and if you can hang around for a couple more years that big discovery may occur during that time
period and you'll be able to catch another wave and buy a couple more years and maybe they can buy
a couple more years. We're in a very exciting time now with all these new discoveries coming out.
This person knows the literature; that's the reality for people that are being diagnosed
with early with metastatic disease at the time of, you know, when they first become aware they
have cancer. These are people, of course, that didn't get PSA screening, unfortunately, and
the whole problem could have probably been avoided if they'd simply gotten a PSA test every year.
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