Tag Archives: health

October 26, 2021 · 12:36 pm

Here’s what you should “eat” to fight prostate cancer…


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OK, I will admit right up front to bait and switch. In the last month I have seen two of my patients who are what the public health aficionados call “positive deviants“. One man is a professional who still goes to work every day. I have been seeing him for about 5 years; he has metastatic cancer in many bones and lymph nodes, a PSA in the 100’s, yet other than being a bit too thin, carries on with his life helping other people in his chosen profession. The second gentleman looks like an olympic athlete – great muscle preservation, a military posture, and also continues to work at his regular job in spite of having “mCRPC” which most readers will know as metastatic castrate resistant prostate cancer. What is it they do far more than most of my other patients? What is their secret diet? …EXERCISE

In this piece from the New York Times on heart health, Dr. Emery, a cardiologist, refers to exercise as a magic pill. “It’s just that you can’t swallow it, you have to earn it,” he notes. You need to click on that hyperlink and read the whole article. These are the benefits for heart health:

  • It enhances the cardiorespiratory system.
  • It increases HDL cholesterol.
  • It lowers triglycerides, a type of fat that circulates in the blood.     
  • It reduces blood pressure and heart rate.      
  • It lowers inflammation and improves blood sugar control.

Best of all, exercise is the type of medicine that appears to produce benefits no matter how small the dose.

But what about prostate cancer you might ask? The studies there are compelling. In a recent article from Taiwan, 125 patients who were treated with ADT and radiation for high risk prostate cancer were studied for changes in body composition. The patients experienced a 5.5% loss in skeletal muscle over 180 days, and each 1% loss of the skeletal muscle index resulted in a 9% increase in non-cancer mortality! Although it is a small study and it is shocking, but it illustrates the problem of taking testosterone away from older men. You don’t need to rely on small studies however. In the Health Professions Follow-Up Study, 2705 men diagnosed with prostate cancer were followed from 1990-2008. “Men with ≥ 3 hours per week of vigorous activity had a 61% lower risk of PCa death (HR, 0.39, 95% CI, 0.18 to 0.84; P = .03) compared with men with less than 1 hour per week of vigorous activity. Men exercising vigorously before and after diagnosis had the lowest risk.”

So, the message is clear. Compared to any “diet changes” you can make, or supplements you might take, exercise is definitely more important to enhance your chances of surviving prostate cancer. Ideally, you should work with a trainer who can help you develop an individualized program that takes into account your current physical fitness. From the NYT article, here is a place to start if you don’t have access to a trainer:

“Anything is better than nothing. But the ideal dose of exercise for adults, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, is as follows:  

  • 150 minutes of moderate-intensity aerobic exercise a week.      
  • 2 sessions of about 30 minutes each of resistance training a week.

You can spread the aerobic activity throughout the week however you like, such as 30 minutes five days a week, or 50 minutes three days a week. Examples include running, swimming, brisk walking, riding a bike, playing basketball or tennis, and doing yard work. As for strength-building activities, ideally, you should set aside at least two days a week for 30 minutes of exercise that works the major muscle groups, such as the legs, back, shoulders and arms. What counts as strength training? Lifting weights, using resistance bands, doing bodyweight exercises like yoga, push ups and sit ups, and even heavy gardening with a lot of digging and shoveling. Vigorous exercise should get your heart rate up to 70 to 85 percent of your maximum heart rate. Not sure what that is? Here’s how to calculate it.” I also recommend your resistance training should utilize weights that cause your muscle group to “fail” on the second or third set of repetitions.

So there you have it – how to change your “diet” to beat prostate cancer. Definitely not as easy as just avoiding red meat and increasing soy products, but almost certainly the most effective thing you can do. Movember is coming up. Time to MOVE!

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July 28, 2021 · 2:18 pm

Cancer Camp and Survivorship


A cancer diagnosis affects every patient in a different way. However, regardless of what type of cancer is involved, it is a cold water “slap in the face” that we all share the same fate: “our days are numbered” – something everyone knows but we generally find it more convenient to simply not think about.

Prostate cancer, in my opinion, is somewhat different in this regard for most men. First, like all cancers, it is clearly a disease of aging, but even more so. The median age at the time of diagnosis is 66 years. This means the majority of newly diagnosed men have lived a reasonably long (and hopefully healthy) life. There has been time to deal with other health threats, watch children grow, and usually face the deaths of parents or close family members. However, the good news is that the vast majority of men will still have the opportunity for enjoying many more years of living.

Taken from the US SEER database: https://seer.cancer.gov/statfacts/html/prost.html

In fact, regardless of race or ethnicity, over 90% of men newly diagnosed with prostate cancer will be alive in 10 years. These data hold true even for men with regional disease, but fall off rapidly if metastatic disease develops. And there is continued improvement in treatment for the metastatic patients as well. In a recent article looking at three large studies for the benefit of second generation androgen receptor antagonists (enzalutamide, apalutamide, darolutamide) to delay metastases and improve survival, even men >80 years of age clearly did better than before.

From Lancet Oncology, July 23, 2021 https://doi.org/10.1016/S1470-2045(21)00334-X

So the question becomes, “what will you do with the time you have left?” regardless of how long that is. My thought, having just returned from volunteering at the Epic Experience cancer camp, is that it always good to take some time and reflect on how you want to spend that time. Write another paper? Start another company? Make even more money? Grasp for the latest treatment option? Or potentially reconsider family and friends and what really matters to you. The Epic organization has had trouble recruiting men to their camps, but for the men who have come, their perspectives have been altered in very positive ways as you will see in this video. Many more women come to the camps, just as women have led the way in advocating for breast cancer research, and in general reaching out via support groups. We have a lot to learn from them!

There are many support groups out there for prostate cancer survivors of all stages. Prostate Cancer Foundation has put a nice list together here. And if you would like online support for specific issues, Movember’s True North initiative has great articles to help you here.

The bottom line for me, having had a chance to “get back to camp”, is that we can all use a little encouragement to get out there and live again as we come out of our COVID isolation. I hope you will do just that this summer!

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March 15, 2020 · 10:17 am

(Love) Advice in the time of (Cholera) Coronavirus


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I wanted the title to look like this, but the software wouldn’t let me: Love Advice in the time of Cholera Coronavirus. In any case, if you are a patient or in the patient age range of prostate cancer you are automatically at some increased risk. There isn’t much evidence that cancer patients in general who aren’t on chemotherapy or an immunosuppressive agent have much increased risk. In fact, patients on ADT may actually do a little better based on reactivation of thymic function. Here is a quote from this complex article by James Gulley and colleagues:

Analyses of these data suggest that AR expressed by thymic epithelium play an important role in thymocyte development, and could explain why androgens induce apoptosis of thymocytes in vivo but not in vitro (31). In subsequent studies, androgen withdrawal led to increased thymopoiesis and reversal of thymic atrophy in post-pubertal male mice (32) and even in aged mice (33, 34). Furthermore, thymopoiesis decreased with the administration of testosterone (35, 36). Castration also results in increased T- cell export in aged mice and increased naive splenic T cells compared to aged controls (34).

Although persistent thymic function is evident in older individuals, it is decreased, as demonstrated by lower TREC [T-cell receptor rearrangement excision circles] levels (37). However, studies show that ADT can induce thymic renewal in older individuals (38). In one study, elderly prostate cancer patients given GnRH-A experienced a notable increase in TRECs in 6 out of 10 cases, indicating renewed thymopoiesis (34). These studies suggest that the effects of androgen ablation are not limited to the young, as evidenced by restoration of thymic function and export of naïve T cells after surgical (orchiectomy) or medical (GnRH-A) castration.

 

The enhanced thymopoiesis associated with ADT has important clinical implications for the treatment of immunocompromised patients and for immunotherapy for prostate cancer (see Figure 3 for a summary of ADT’s effects on the T-cell compartment). Thymic renewal in these patients may increase the diversity of the T-cell repertoire, increasing the pool of antigens recognized by the immune system. In the setting of vaccine therapy, an increased naïve T-cell compartment may enhance the response to immunotherapy.

 A few patients have asked me about whether to postpone surgery. In general, for patients with “average” (Gleason 3+4) tumors, this would probably be OK. It is a harder decision for those with Gleason 4+3, or any component of Gleason 5. It will have to be an individual decision (as are all decisions of this sort) with your doctor. The same would apply to radiation therapy treatment which can have some immunosuppressive effects, but certainly has never been studied in this situation.

In general, I would also recommend that you put aside your political biases and listen to the scientific experts. I was disturbed by a poll presented this morning on Face the Nation that indicated a significant difference in the perceptions of risk between Republicans and Democrats. This virus does not know or care about your party or politics. Practice the social isolation being recommended by Fauci and the other experts: “We should be over-reacting to this…” It would be just fine to look back and say we did that.

If you want to delve further into the science of this (which also dispels a lot of misinformation about where the virus comes from and how it arose), you should certainly look at this presentation: http://www.croiconference.org/

And in case you haven’t been thoroughly inundated with advice or just came out from under a rock, here is the succinct list of expert recommendations:

  • Social Distancing to flatten the curve of the pandemic (reduce infectivity rate from >2 to <1):
    • Wash/sanitize hands frequently
    • If sick, do not go to work
    • Work from home if at all possible
    • Maintain your personal space when around others
    • Eliminate travel (don’t be fooled by cheap flights or hotels)
    • Reduce exposure to groups of people
    • COVID-19 can persist on hard surfaces for several days so wipe down frequent contact surfaces repeatedly
    • Recognize that social distancing will have some mental health implications so be especially compassionate

Stay home. Stay well. Here is a list of things to do:  Fun Free Time Activities_

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November 11, 2019 · 8:15 am

Immuno-Fighting Cancer Like Wildfires


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I live in what is now known as the urban wildland interface west of Denver, the kind of area prone to the devastating fires that have been scorching California. Our firewise community efforts have taught us a lot about how a single windblown ember from miles away can destroy your house, and many of us have done a lot of mitigation. But, if the “big one” comes, our best hope is to grab the family albums and head down the hill.

Cancer can be very similar. If someone walks in with widespread disease, unless it is one of the highly treatable ones like testis cancer, flying over the patient with flame retardant (chemotherapy) may delay things for a while, but often the home is lost. The earliest realization of how to do better may have come from breast cancer. William Halstead realized in 1894 that putting out the fire effectively might include getting the surrounding “embers” (lymph nodes) at the time of removing the primary breast tumor (campfire in this analogy). A century later, it had become clear that in many instances the embers had spread too far for more radical surgical approaches, but that in some cases the embers could be extinguished (adjuvant chemotherapy) before the fire got out of control.

But what if the fire could be self-extinguishing? What if there was a boy scout at the campfire with a fire extinguisher? Better yet, what if you had smoke jumpers who could parachute in and help the boy by putting out the small fires elsewhere started by the embers? Immunotherapy offers just such hope. In the 1980’s we learned that giving high dose IL-2 to some patients with particularly sensitive tumors (kidney, melanoma) could produce cures in some cases. I liken this to sending in a group of non-specialist firemen/women in huge numbers to fight the forest fire doing the best they can.

Sending these individuals to more specialized training resulted in Provenge (sipuleucel-T), the first “vaccine” approved for treating any cancer, prostate being the target, and I was fortunate to participate in some of the first trials of this approach. But what was needed was both more effective equipment (in this case the PD-1 inhibitors that can “extinguish” the cancer’s ability to turn off the immune response) and more highly trained firefighters (potentially think of CAR-T cells) who have advanced skills, graduate degrees from a university, and can be deployed to go in search of the embers.

Now to torture this analogy just a bit further, let’s imagine that rather than sending the firefighters to universities for advanced generalized training, we could send them to CIA camps where they would receive the most specialized training possible right at the site where the fire started. In cancer, this may be the idea of using cryotherapy or irreversible electroporation to kill the local tumor, then injecting some cocktail of immune stimulatory molecules that enhance the body’s ability to create very effective T-cells that can go out as smoke jumpers looking for the embers (metastases), without the need for the university training outside the body (Sip-T or CAR-T).

Screen Shot 2019-11-11 at 8.13.35 AM

Already there are clinical trials underway with this technique that show promise. Gary Onik has demonstrated some remarkable responses in metastatic prostate cancer patients. Diwakar Davar just presented similarly exciting data in high risk melanoma patients who received intratumoral CMP-001 and systemic nivolumab before resection of the primary tumors. 62% of the patients had no tumor left in their surgical specimens! So  the cancer/firefighters are out there and although there will always be wildfires we simply can’t extinguish, the prospects for controlling them before or soon after they have spread have never looked better.

 

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January 19, 2019 · 6:26 pm

Prostate Cancer and “the art of aging”


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As all of us septuagenarians (and probably octogenarians) know, and as Gilda Radner entitled her book, “It’s always something.” In it, she goes on to say, “I wanted a perfect ending. Now I’ve learned, the hard way, that some poems don’t rhyme, and some stories don’t have a clear beginning, middle, and end. Life is about not knowing, having to change, taking the moment and making the best of it, without knowing what’s going to happen next. Delicious Ambiguity.”

For most prostate cancer patients, the challenges presented by that diagnosis occur at a time of life when one is forced to admit that the sprained ankle doesn’t heal as fast, gray hairs are appearing, and/or your hairline is receding (or the bald patch growing), and there may indeed be as much life stretching out behind you in the rear view mirror as lies ahead. While one can choose to fight the cancer with every possible modern intervention, it is also true that there will be other challenges awaiting just around the corner, and it is impossible to handicap the inevitable threats to your health, of which prostate cancer is but one.

Recognizing this, and realizing that we spent two decades over-treating many patients, gave rise to the current option of “active surveillance” for men with low grade disease (Gleason 3+3, some 3+4). One of the most mature studies of this approach was published in the NEJM just last month. Peter Albertson, writing in F1000, nicely summarized the key findings from the article:

“First, the most powerful predictor of long-term outcome remains the Gleason score. Following surgery, men with Gleason 4+3 disease have an almost six times greater risk of dying from prostate cancer and men with Gleason 8 or 9 disease have an almost eleven times risk of dying from prostate cancer compared with men with lower grade Gleason 3+3 or 3+4 disease. Second, radical prostatectomy can provide improved outcomes, lowering the absolute risk of dying from prostate cancer by 11.7% and extending life by almost 3 years. Third, younger men less than 65 years of age at diagnosis are much more likely to benefit from surgery when compared to older men. Fourth, men with low grade cancer (Gleason 3+3 or 3+4) appear to have comparable outcomes and rarely died following surgery. The article was silent concerning the relative clinical outcomes of surgery and watchful waiting in this group of men. An important caveat to remember is that most men participating in this trial were diagnosed based upon clinical findings, not from testing for prostate-specific antigen. As suggested by data from the PROTECT trial, screen detected prostate cancer appears to introduce a lead time that could be as great as 10 years. This confounds estimates of the efficacy of surgical treatment especially among older men.”

I just submitted my own take on the active surveillance vs prostatectomy trial as follows:

“There is little to add to Dr. Albertsen’s excellent review although there are a few issues I would add as important perspectives in these kinds of long term followups. First, as a disease of aging, prostate cancer has many competitors in terms of cause of death. 261/347 (71.9%) men in the radical prostatectomy group and 292/348 (83.8%) men in the watchful waiting group have died from any cause. Of the 261 men in the prostatectomy group, 71(27.2%) died from prostate cancer while in the watchful waiting group, there were 110 deaths from prostate cancer (37.7%). From this perspective, prostate cancer is important, but far from the “most” important cause of death with ~2/3 of men dying from other causes regardless of what we do. Second, one needs to consider the quality of life (QOL), and this paper clearly indicates that many men develop metastases, requiring ADT with its side effects and this is reduced by prostatectomy, while the side effects of prostatectomy itself also take a very high toll on sexual function and a lesser, but significant risk of incontinence. If our goal is to “first do no harm”, the challenges of caring for men as they age remain with us, even as our technology for discovering earlier disease (in prostate cancer) and treating late disease (from any cause) advances.”

But there is something we can do to combat both prostate cancer and aging! Vigorous exercise. In a study performed at two hospitals in Canada and the UK, total and vigorous physical activity resulted in fewer men having worsening prostate cancer while on active surveillance. Further, retrospective studies demonstrate similar advantages even for men with metastatic disease. And if you don’t have prostate cancer, feel free to look at the 100’s of articles showing improved quality and length of life you can achieve with exercise (compared to minimal/no benefit from supplements). I’m also a fan of Fred Bartlit’s book, “Choosing the Strong Path” and his crusade to age gracefully by pumping iron. So the message is clear, even though “it’s always something” as we age or fight our cancers, we have it in our power to do something. Enjoy your time on the treadmill folks!!

 

 

 

 

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November 1, 2018 · 12:45 am

It’s MO time – please help!


To view this post on my blog site, sign up for future posts, and read more info relevant to prostate cancer, please click here. Donate to my moustache here. Even better, grow your own and get your friends to help out here. The more of us who join in, the wider the recognition of men’s health issues.

In my career fighting for the cure of prostate cancer, two organizations (besides the National Cancer Institute) have been outstanding partners. Movember was started by a couple of friends in a bar in Australia. This became the answer to a long standing jealousy of mine for something as popular and effective as the Susan G. Koman Foundation and Race for the Cure. I often refer to our prostate cancer journey when I lecture by noting how we “crawl for the cure” while our sisters are racing. In 2016, the NCI budget for breast cancer research was $519.9 million, more than twice as much as that for prostate cancer at $241 million. This, in spite of the fact that prostate cancer deaths this year are 3/4 as common (29,430) as breast cancer deaths (40,920). It’s not a contest really, since all cancer research is moving the field forward rapidly, but Movember has been incredibly helpful in sponsoring research and advocating for us.

The other organization, Prostate Cancer Foundation, shows how much a single individual with great connections and personal motivation can do. Michael Milken deserves enormous credit for his vision and leadership. I personally benefited from grants given out by the foundation, and even more from their amazing annual meeting that draws together prostate cancer researchers from around the world to share data and ideas. Dr. Howard Soule is a key factor in PCF’s incredible success and his name should be as well known as Susan G. Koman in my view.

I hope you will join with all of us in fighting for the cure in prostate cancer. Grow one, or support someone who is growing, and tell your friends. The progress and future has never been brighter, and our hairy upper lips should show it!

Screen Shot 2018-10-31 at 12.44.06 PM

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September 30, 2018 · 9:03 am

Money, Medicine, and Me


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In an article appearing on Medscape on September 13, a Reuters correspondent cited a recent study published in the Lancet looking at doctors who tweet. Although tweeting is a form of social media I have not embraced, I did participate in an attempt to study its use in the ASCO meetings in this article. However, the Medscape and Lancet articles did cause me to think about transparency in this blog.

I began blogging at the invitation of an internet company looking for physicians who would provide content they could use. When they were successful enough, they began using pharmaceutical advertising, and I left them, choosing to pay for my own web presence on wordpress.com. However, I now realize that I should also disclose my other relationships with pharmaceutical companies. In the Medscape article, there is a reference to a government website where you can look up the payments and transactions I have with pharmaceutical companies. What it does not reveal is the nature of those transactions which I will herewith share.

In doing drug development, pharmaceutical companies rely on [mostly] academic physicians to perform clinical trials. These activities may involve grants to study drugs in the laboratory, grants to their institutions to offset the cost of data managers, IRB costs, and reimbursement for travel to discuss the ongoing trial or its publication with other physician/researchers. In the past, I have had support in all of these categories, most notably (in terms of career influences) in the development of leuprolide, the first new drug approved for treating prostate cancer in many decades back in ~1985. It was an amazing opportunity for a young faculty member to treat the first patients in the world with a new drug, eventually present the findings to the FDA, publish the results, and then participate in teaching the medical community about its use.

Since then, the landscape of disclosure has changed for the better. Now when my colleagues and I give presentations or publish articles we sign disclosure agreements revealing which companies we consult for, and there are annual reporting requirements to our academic institutions. In my case, the current companies I have consulting relationships with include Janssen (abiraterone, apalutamide), Bayer (rogaratinib), and Seattle Genetics (enfortumab vedotin). I also have founded (and have ownership interests in) Aurora Oncology, ProTechSure, and Gonex/Cedus, three startup companies attempting to move drugs we have worked on in my laboratory to the clinic. None of these relationships involve giving promotional talks, using company slides in education, or advocating for the drugs on this blog or elsewhere. For the large commercial companies they involve insuring patient safety in ongoing trials as an independent monitor.

I have expressed my concerns about the rapid increase in medical costs for cancer care here and here. I do not have a solution for this intrinsically difficult challenge in our capitalistic system, and I realize that my own consulting and entrepreneurial activities ultimately add to those costs. Indeed, the costs of prostate cancer detection and treatment in men over 70 is 1.2 Billion dollars every 3 years. The newest targeted agents and immuno-oncology agents are phenomenally expensive, often in the $8-10,000/month range which can result in severe economic distress even for those patients who have co-pay supplemental insurance. Eventually, American medicine, with all of its amazing basic science and translational science (bench to bedside research) will need to find a balance between the profit motives that drive innovation and the altruistic care that medicine embodies in its most noble applications. What is an extra 3 months of life worth, and what toxicities (economic or clinical) are acceptable to pay for that? We need to have honest discussions as a society, and importantly, with our own families about these questions, especially when we are facing the diminishing benefits of aggressive/expensive care in terminal illnesses.

 

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August 27, 2018 · 8:38 am

A perfect death


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This week in which the country will come together to mourn the passing of a true American original, John McCain, it might be worth considering our (your) own mortality. Even as the ongoing progress toward controlling prostate cancer is underway, it remains clear that “something else” will get us. As an example, in a study I was privileged to lead among patients with high risk prostate cancer, other cancers (many of which were caused by our adjuvant mitoxantrone treatment) were as likely to lead to death and prostate cancer was the cause of dying only ~20% of the time

Screen Shot 2018-08-27 at 8.22.09 AM

As oncologists, we face the “end of life” issues more frequently than most physicians, and certainly deal with the reality of death more than folks in most other professions. I distinctly remember one lovely woman in her 50’s who was very open in discussing her wishes. She wanted to die while lying on her favorite beach in Florida watching the sunlight sparkling on the ocean – not an easy thing to arrange (and it didn’t happen). My own fantasy would be to have a lovely vacation in Hawaii (without this week’s rain) with my entire family, say my good-byes as I put them all on the plane, and stay over an extra day to pay for the hotel and be sure all of my financial affairs were up to date – then die of a heart attack on the way home the next day. Perfect. The airline would be carrying my carcass home for the mere cost of a coach seat and I wouldn’t even have to suffer that long in the crunched position with no leg room.

Short of these fantasies, however, I recently undertook an exercise that anyone could do and I herewith commend to you as well. My wife and I were lucky enough to score tickets to the London production of Hamilton last February. In it, there were two numbers that grabbed me by the heart. First was Washington’s “teach ’em how to say goodbye” song, “One Last Time”. As with John McCain’s final commentaries over the past few months, Hamilton’s farewell speech written for Washington was masterful (as is Lin-Manuel Miranda’s reprise).

But the song that most moved me to tears (and action) was “Who Lives, Who Dies, Who Tells Your Story”. After listening to it about a dozen times, I realized that we all have a story. It may not be as honest/noble as John McCain’s, or as consequential as Hamilton’s or Washington’s, but for some small group of your relatives or children or grandchildren, your story will have special meaning. If you don’t write it, your memories of your father, your grandfather, your family in general will die with you. In my case, I read a couple of autobiographies, self-published, from friends/acquaintances and decided that their stories were highly personal, and not terribly interesting. But when I started writing the story of my own grandfather and father, and my story, it was a joyful experience of reliving many happy memories, and a way of reconnecting with my first love affair, our children’s births, and the many blessings that have come my way. The result is not a literary masterpiece, but I am going to have it bound and give a copy to each of my kids to gather dust on their bookshelves.

In the arc of history, some things have not changed. “Our days may come to seventy years, or eighty, if our strength endures; yet the best of them are but trouble and sorrow, for they quickly pass, and we fly away.” (Psalm 90:10). Although trouble and sorrow are a part of life (and of dying), there can be real joy in pausing to appreciate all life has given you. Carpe diem!

 

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January 10, 2018 · 2:25 pm

Of Prostates and Teslas


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If you thought this might be an article about how your urologist shops for his/her newest fancy car, you are mistaken (sadly…). Nikola Tesla was a fascinating inventor and ultimately “mad scientist” at the turn of the last century. Every time you plug your cuisinart into the wall to chop something up, you are the beneficiary of his contributions to the alternating current coming to your kitchen and the motor driving the chopper. My favorite story (because of the local connection) was his laboratory in Colorado Springs, where he attempted to develop a method of transmitting power without wires. By creating YUUUGE electromagnetic fields, he could make lots of electrical things happen at considerable distances, including knocking out the power station for the city. Here’s a quote from the Wikipedia article:

He produced artificial lightning, with discharges consisting of millions of volts and up to 135 feet (41 m) long.[11] Thunder from the released energy was heard 15 miles (24 km) away in Cripple Creek, Colorado. People walking along the street observed sparks jumping between their feet and the ground. Sparks sprang from water line taps when touched. Light bulbs within 100 feet (30 m) of the lab glowed even when turned off. Horses in a livery stable bolted from their stalls after receiving shocks through their metal shoes. Butterflies were electrified, swirling in circles with blue halos of St. Elmo’s fire around their wings.[12]

Of course, for purposes of this blog, the key thing is that the strength of magnetic fields was named after him. When you get an MRI of your prostate, brain, or anything else, you are put into a machine with a superconducting magnet that produces 1.5 or 3 “T” of strength. At the risk of being completely wrong and oversimplifying, what happens in the MRI machine is that a strong magnetic field temporarily lines up the hydrogen atoms in the water that is 70% of “you”, and when these atoms “relax” they give off radio signals that can be converted to images. Details and images are here. Early on, my colleagues and I were fascinated by the possibility of using MR to investigate the prostate gland and published an article (completely ignored – cited only 3 times, so must not have been that important…) showing changes in MR that occurred after testosterone administration to castrated rats.

Now there are complex MRI protocols to image the prostate using techniques I don’t fully understand (multiparametric imaging) that give us remarkable pictures of the prostate gland. Here is one:

Screen Shot 2018-01-10 at 1.53.20 PM

Prostate gland with red arrow indicating a suspicious lesion that could be biopsied or followed closely.

As with any radiologic imaging technique, the skill of the radiologist as well as the equipment being used determine the accuracy of the MRI to diagnose a cancer.

While most of us learned how to “read X-rays” in medical school, it is beyond most clinicians to read MRI’s of the prostate. Fortunately, the radiologists have developed a system that helps us think about “how abnormal” some area of the gland is, called PI-RADS.  This can be very useful in thinking about what area to concentrate on when biopsying a patient, or in trying to determine whether surgery or radiation therapy should be altered if there is concern that the cancer is outside of the gland. An interesting question that is still controversial is whether the MRI could replace repetitive biopsies in a man who has chosen active surveillance. Particularly when combined with molecular techniques (see my previous blog here) to characterize biopsies, it may be that Tesla will be helping to do more than get you from one place to another or run your electric shaver. (Rock on, Elon Musk) To me, that is a pretty interesting outcome from knocking out all of the lights in Colorado Springs!

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June 19, 2014 · 8:40 am

What is going to kill me? – the cloudy crystal ball


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With an intense focus on prostate cancer, it is easy to overlook the reality of other causes of death or disability in making decisions about therapy. An example of this issue is the proliferation of molecular tests that have been validated to separate patients with “intermediate risk”, or “low risk” into “even lower” or “even higher” risk disease categories using a number of different gene expression profiles on the tumor or biopsy material. For example, Genomic Health offers the Oncotype Dx test that provides a “Genomic Prostate Score” that gives a patient who (based on clinical criteria such as PSA and number of biopsy cores positive) falls into a low or intermediate risk category another lab value (GPS) that can potentially be useful in making a decision about treatment. GenomeDx has a test that can evaluate high risk men after prostatectomy to more accurately predict metastatic disease at 5 years. There is a very balanced article on the challenges of using these tests (which are a potential step forward to be sure) in the real world of the clinic here.

However, in all of the excitement and marketing of these and other tests, a couple of key facts are often overlooked (and may be much more important in decision making). Prostate cancer is generally a slow disease anyway. Competing mortality looms large as patients get older. And most importantly, there are validated ways to put the “whole patient” into the picture before ordering these tests, whether they be a PSA, biopsy, or molecular analysis. The Charlson comorbidity index can be extremely useful in predicting survival and is barely ever mentioned in the molecular analysis literature/reports. It is a simple yes/no answer to whether a patient has any of these 12 conditions: diabetes, bleeding gastrointestinal ulcer, chronic lung disease, congestive heart failure, stroke, myocardial infarction, angina or chest pain, cirrhosis or liver disease, arthritis, inflammatory bowel disease, hypertension, and depression. In a lovely article published last year, the use of this analysis in relationship to prostate cancer mortality gave a vivid picture of prostate cancer mortality in the larger setting of 3533 men with prostate cancer. A snapshot of their data looks like this:

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Very often, the comorbid conditions lead to death from another cause. In my opinion (and in my practice), we too often ignore our ability to quantify the risk of dying from “something else” when we focus so intensely on the PSA or other tests in counseling patients about what to do. It is also true that patient perception of test results can vary dramatically. One patient with a “GPS score” of 10 might be reassured, while another will perceive it as “not low enough” and opt for aggressive treatment rather than observation. To some extent this exposes the fallacy of “we need to separate the issue of treatment from that of diagnosis” thinking. Until the crystal ball becomes crystal clear, management of prostate cancer will remain challenging and requires the kind of wholistic thinking that is often better done by primary care physicians or public health professionals than by prostate cancer docs, or their patients.

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