Although before the life forecast of patients with Prostate cancer It was measured in months, experts claim that medical advances have increased years to survival.
Prostate cancer experts claim that the diagnosis of former president Joe Biden is serious. According to the announcement made by his office on Sunday, cancer has spread to the bones. And it is in stage 4, the deadliest of the disease. That is to say, It has no cure.
But the good news, said prostate cancer specialists, is that recent advances in the diagnosis and treatment of this condition –Based largely on investigations financed by the National Health Institutes and the Department of Defense– They have changed what was once an extremely gloomy panorama for men with advanced disease.
“Now life is measured in years, not in months”Said Daniel W. Lin, a specialist in prostate cancer at the University of Washington.
Judd Moul, an expert in prostate cancer at the University of Duke, said that men whose prostate cancer has spread to the bones “can live five, seven, 10 years or more” with current treatments. A man like Biden, from eighty and so many years, “hopefully could die of natural causes and not for prostate cancer,” he said.
Biden’s office said the former president had urinary symptoms, which led him to seek medical attention.
But, said Lin, “I doubt that his symptoms were due to cancer.”
Instead, he said, Most likely, a doctor did an exam, observe a nodule in the Biden prostate and make a blood testthe specific prostate antigen test. This test looks for a protein that cancer cells releases, and can be followed by magnetic resonance. The blood test and magnetic resonance would have indicated cancer.
At this time, patients such as Biden and others who develop metastatic prostate cancer diagnoses are more fortunate than past patients. There are about 10 new treatments for the disease, and have remarkably changed the panorama.
The first line of attack is to cut the testosterone that feeds prostate cancer. When Moul began as a urologist in the 1980s, that was done by removing the testicles of man. Today, men can choose between two injectable drugs that prevent the testicles from producing testosterone, or a pill that does the same.
But these drugs alone are not enough. Then, doctors add any of the three or four medications called antiandrogens that intercept the testosterone that still manages to occur in the testicles.
Some men, depending on the amount of cancer they have in the bones, where the disease tends to go, also receive additional treatment, with chemotherapy or radiotherapy.
There have also been improvements in diagnosis
Until recently, doctors determined how much cancer were in the bones with scanners that sought inflammation. They now have a more precise scanner, called positron emission tomography (PEP) of the specific prostate antigen of membrane (PSMA). This uses a radioactive tracer that adheres to a marker on the surface of the prostate cells. It allows doctors to detect cancer much earlier, which means that men with prostate cancer cells in the bones usually have a much better prognosis – because they can have treatment before – than men who underwent bone gammographs only a few years ago.
Finally, if medications that block testosterone and chemotherapy and radiotherapy stop working, there are other drugs that can be used to control cancer.
Lin said that the contribution of federal money for investigation, with the “MoNshot” effort of Biden against cancer, largely led to this progress. Biden, he said, “was one of the first presidents to put cancer in the foreground.”
For his part, Moul said that he regularly sees men of the age of Biden with prostate cancers in stadium 4 and that he is now much more optimistic than before.
“We have many more available tools,” said Moul. “Survival rates have almost tripled in the last decade. I can’t imagine how much it has changed.”