This complete guide to Bipolar Androgen Therapy (BAT) should be your stepping-off point if you are interested in using BAT to treat your castrate-resistant prostate cancer (CrPC).
Several men have asked us if they are better off having 177Lu-PSMA-617 (Pluvicto) or Xofigo, a radiopharmaceutical drug that treats bone metastases. There is no simple answer, and the answer is not the same for each of us. Making a sound decision can be helped by understanding the mode of action and the limits of each treatment.
LYNPARZA (olaparib) and RUBRACA (rucaparib) are PARP Inhibitors that were FDA approved in May of 2020 for men with castrate resistant prostate cancer who also have certain genetic mutations. The FDA also approved certain Companion Diagnostic genetic tests to go along with the decision making to use these PARP Inhibitors.
There is a lot of information now available with these recent developments which makes decision making confusing.
There are several possible side effects that can result from receiving radiation treatment. The most common of these side effects include the development of scar tissue that makes it hard to urinate (pee), defecate (poop), and in some instances, link the activity of either peeing and pooping together; bladder or colon bleeding and diarrhea.
Shorter prostate-specific antigen doubling time was significantly associated with shorter metastasis-free survival and overall survival.
The development of metastasis was associated with a 3-fold higher risk of death.
The onset of non-metastatic castrate-resistant prostate cancer and metastatic castrate-resistant prostate cancer was associated with substantial cost increases.
Given the importance of knowing about your germline genetics, Cancer ABCs wants you to know that if you have prostate cancer there is currently a genetic company, Invitae that is offering you an opportunity to have your germline genetics tested for free. They will also offer you, for free, access to a genetic counselor
How best to treat oligometastatic prostate cancer is still not clear, but there are several on-going studies designed to determine what should be best practices. Although not yet completed, these studies do indicate that metastasis-directed therapy (MDT) and local therapy targeted to the primary tumor (in the prostate gland) may be of benefit in the setting of oligometastatic disease.
Through the work of Huggins et al. [1] in 1941, it was shown that metastatic prostate cancer responds positively to an orchiectomy (surgical castration). We now know that there isn’t any other therapy which produces a more reliable regression of both distant and local disease than androgen withdrawal (ADT).
