Medicare plans to pay for sipuleucel-T (Provenge), the autologous immunotherapy for prostate cancer, following a determination that it is genuinely effective in metastatic hormone-refractory disease, according to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.Almost a third of older men with limited life expectancy continue to have unnecessary PSA tests, data from a population-based survey showed.
Gary Schwitzer's HealthNewsReview Blog Gary Schwitzer Publisher , HealthNewsReview.org feedback healthnewsreview.org Excessive PSA screening in elderly men with limited life expectancies remains a significant problem By Gary Schwitzer on March 29, 2011 2:03 PM No Comments No TrackBacks A study in the Journal of Clinical Oncology found that that men in their seventies had prostate cancer screening nearly twice as often as men in their early fifties , who are more likely to benefit from prostate cancer detection and treatment . An American Society for Clinical Oncology news release includes this quote : Our findings show a high rate of elderly and sometimes ill men being inappropriately screened for prostate cancer . We're concerned these screenings may prompt cancer treatment among elderly
Gary Schwitzer's HealthNewsReview Blog Gary Schwitzer Publisher , HealthNewsReview.org feedback healthnewsreview.org Supermarket chain hawking Quaker products free cholesterol screening By Gary Schwitzer on March 28, 2011 1:57 PM No Comments No TrackBacks An online acquaintance in public health sent me this picture with this note : What's next Get your free PSA w 3 boxes of selenium In the fine print of the campaign by Cub Foods and their pharmacies , there is no mention of the age requirement for the coupon , nor of the recommended age for cholesterol screening . The U.S . Preventive Services Task Force states : Screening Men The U.S . Preventive Services Task Force USPSTF strongly recommends screening men aged 35 and older for lipid disorders . The USPSTF recommends screening men aged 20Men with locally advanced prostate cancer had 40% to 50% reductions in the risk of progression, metastasis, and mortality with just six months of androgen deprivation before radiation therapy, results of a large randomized trial showed.
Succumbed to March Madness.
Taking a break.
My alma mater, Marquette, is in The Sweet Sixteen.
Sportswriter for Star Tribune wrote last week that they didn't even belong in the tourney!
We'll save SportsNewsReview.org for another time.
Rapid adoption of newer technologies added an estimated $350 million to the cost of treating localized prostate cancer in 2005, despite a lack of comparative effectiveness data, authors of a new study concluded.Gary Schwitzer's HealthNewsReview Blog Gary Schwitzer Publisher , HealthNewsReview.org feedback healthnewsreview.org Questions about proton beam therapy in health care industry magazine By Gary Schwitzer on March 17, 2011 12:14 PM No Comments No TrackBacks Anthony J . Montagnolo , executive vice president and chief operating officer at ECRI Institute , writes in Trustee magazine , A Question of Value : Proton therapy's benefits have a big price tag . Is it right for your hospital Although this is an article and a publication targeted at directors of hospitals and health care systems , what it says should be of interest to journalists , patients and consumers . Excerpt : First question : How well does this really work An even better question : What objective clinical evidence exists toGary Schwitzer's HealthNewsReview Blog Gary Schwitzer Publisher , HealthNewsReview.org feedback healthnewsreview.org Pizaazz in Spring Training Edition of Health Wonk Review By Gary Schwitzer on March 17, 2011 11:30 AM No Comments No TrackBacks Pizaazz blog publisher Glenn Laffel hits a home run with his hosting of this week's Health Wonk Review demonstrating a great on-base percentage more than 50 links in one post creativity and energy . And he even included links to two of my recent posts . Why the baseball link to health policy Glenn writes : People have said that Baseball is Life . That may be stretching it for folks not named Yogi , but surely the game holds lessons for us all . even health policy wonks ADDENDUM ONE HOUR AFTER ORIGINAL POST : I've been reminded of a classic postGary Schwitzer's HealthNewsReview Blog Gary Schwitzer Publisher , HealthNewsReview.org feedback healthnewsreview.org Study evaluates promotional tone in HRT journal articles By Gary Schwitzer on March 16, 2011 2:42 PM No Comments No TrackBacks In an analysis published in the journal PLoS Medicine Adriane Fugh-Berman and colleagues reflect on the facts : that Even after the Women's Health Initiative WHI found that the risks of menopausal hormone therapy hormone therapy outweighed benefit for asymptomatic women , about half of gynecologists in the United States continued to believe that hormones benefited women's health . The pharmaceutical industry has supported publication of articles in medical journals for marketing purposes . So they tried to analyze promotional tone in publishedGary Schwitzer's HealthNewsReview Blog Gary Schwitzer Publisher , HealthNewsReview.org feedback healthnewsreview.org NPR much better than WebMD in explaining observational study on fish oil macular degeneration By Gary Schwitzer on March 15, 2011 12:26 PM 1 Comment No TrackBacks One story an NPR blog story ran only 428 words . Another on WebMD ran 661 words . Usually you'd think the longer story did a better job evaluating the evidence . But in these examples of two stories on the same study , the shorter NPR blog story did a far better job of reminding readers of the limitations of drawing conclusions from observational studies . It stated : But the researcher couldn't resist adding a professorial caveat : But in order to strengthen a possible causal relationship , we need randomizedGary Schwitzer's HealthNewsReview Blog Gary Schwitzer Publisher , HealthNewsReview.org feedback healthnewsreview.org Questioning colonoscopy evidence By Gary Schwitzer on March 14, 2011 11:58 AM 4 Comments No TrackBacks Breast cancer expert Dr . Susan Love wrote on her Facebook page last week : Had my routine colonoscopy today . did you know that there is no study showing that screening colonoscopy is better than sigmoidoscopy in reducing deaths from colon cancer . and yet the beat goes on . She also linked to a public radio Marketplace piece , Should the colonoscopy be the gold standard' We're starting to hear this question more often . And many times , it's being asked by Dr . James Allison , an emeritus professor at the University of California-San Francisco in the Division of .
Eventhough screening for prostate cancer with the Prostate Specific Antigen (PSA) test in men ages 50-70 can detect the cancer before it becomes symptomatic, knowing whether screening is beneficial for these men is uncertain. Recent trials have shown small or no reductions in prostate cancer mortality among those screened. The small potential for benefit must be balanced against the more common and immediate downsides of increasing the chance of prostate cancer diagnosis and therapy-related complications........ Men who have a baseline PSA value of 10 or higher the first time they are tested are up to 11 times more likely to die from prostate cancer than are men with lower initial values, as per Duke University Medical Center researchers. Researchers say the finding, appearing early online in the journal Cancer, supports routine, early prostate-specific antigen (PSA) screening among healthy men with normal life expectancy a practice several studies have recently questioned........ Prostate cancer advances when tumors become resistant to hormone treatment, which is the standard therapy for patients, and begin producing their own androgens. Scientists at UT Southwestern Medical Center have observed that blocking one of the enzymatic steps that allow the tumor to produce androgens could be the key in halting a tumor's growth........ Some types of prostate tumors are more aggressive and more likely to metastasize than others. Nearly one-third of these aggressive tumors contain a small nest of particularly dangerous cells known as neuroendocrine-type cells. More rarely, some aggressive prostate tumors are made up entirely of neuroendocrine-type cells. The presence of neuroendocrine-type cancer cells is linked to a poor prognosis, but spotting these rare cells can be like finding a needle in a haystack. Now, as per a research findings reported in the July 13 issue of Cancer Cell, a team of researchers led by Ze'ev Ronai, Ph.D. at Sanford-Burnham Medical Research Institute (Sanford-Burnham) has identified a series of proteins that might make it easier for doctors to better diagnose the more metastatic forms of prostate cancer........ Consumption of 50 g or more of alcohol per day or four or more drinks per day for at least five days per week was linked to an elevated risk for prostate cancer. Furthermore, drinking 50 g or more of alcohol per day rendered therapy with finasteride ineffective. Scientists analyzed data from 2,129 participants with cancer and 8,791 participants without disease from the Prostate Cancer Prevention Trial. They examined the relationships between risk for low- and high-grade prostate cancer and total alcohol consumption, types of alcoholic beverages and consumption pattern. Scientists also analyzed the effect of alcohol consumption on the effectiveness of finasteride based on the arms that patients were randomly assigned to in the original trial........ In what could lead to a major advance in the therapy of prostate cancer, researchers now know exactly why polyphenols in red wine and green tea inhibit cancer growth. This new discovery, published online in The FASEB Journal (http://www.fasebj.org), explains how antioxidants in red wine and green tea produce a combined effect to disrupt an important cell signaling pathway necessary for prostate cancer growth. This finding is important because it may lead to the development of drugs that could stop or slow cancer progression, or improve current therapys........ Johns Hopkins experts have found that men enrolled in an active surveillance program for prostate cancer that eventually needed surgery to remove their prostates fared just as well as men who opted to remove the gland immediately, except if a follow-up biopsy during surveillance showed high-grade cancer........ Van Andel Research Institute (VARI) researchers have determined how two proteins mandatory for the initiation and development of prostate cancer interact at the molecular level, which could lead to improved therapys for the disease. One of the proteins, androgen receptor, is already an important drug target for prostate cancer. The other, steroid receptor coactivator-3 (SRC3), was originally identified for its role in the development of breast cancer. SCR3 has also been characterized as a key factor in the development of prostate cancer, but, until now, the exact relationship between androgen receptor and SCR3 has been unclear........ Seventy per cent of men who received androgen-deprivation treatment (ADT) after surgery to remove their prostate gland gained significant weight in the first year, putting on an average of 4.2kg, as per a paper in the recent issue of the urology journal BJUI. Scientists studied the recorded weights of 132 men who underwent radical prostatectomy between 1988 and 2009 at four US Veterans Affairs Medical Centers in California, Georgia and North Carolina, before and after they received ADT........ Fewer prostate cancers were detected by prostate-specific antigen (PSA) screening in the U.S. than in a European randomized trial because of lower screening sensitivity, as per a new brief communication published online February 8 in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute To compare the PSA screening performance in a clinical trial with that in a population setting, Elisabeth M. Wever, MSc, Department of Public Health, Erasmus Medical Center, the Netherlands, and his colleagues applied a microsimulation model developed for prostate cancer and screening to the European Randomized Study of Screening for Prostate Cancer (ERSPC)Rotterdam. The model was adapted by replacing the trial's demography parameters with U.S.-specific ones and the screening protocol with the frequency of PSA tests in the population. The natural progression of prostate cancer and the sensitivity (percentage of men correctly identified as having prostate cancer of those who have preclinical prostate cancer) of a PSA test followed by a biopsy were assumed to be the same in the US as in the trial........ Prostate cancer cells are more likely to spread to other parts of the body if a specific gene quits functioning normally, as per new data from scientists at UT Southwestern Medical Center. Certain prostate cancer cells can be held in check by the DAB2IP gene. The gene's product, the DABIP protein, acts as scaffolding that prevents a number of other proteins involved in the progression of prostate cancer cells from over-activation. When those cells lose the DAB2IP protein, however, they break free and are able to metastasize, or spread, drastically increasing the risk of cancer progression in other organs as the cells travel through the bloodstream or lymph system........ A diagnosis of prostate cancer raises the question for patients and their physicians as to how the tumor will behave. Will it grow quickly and aggressively and require continuous therapy, or slowly, allowing treatment and its risks to be safely delayed? The answer may lie in the size and shape of the blood vessels that are visible within the cancer, as per research led by researchers at The Ohio State University Comprehensive Cancer Center-Arthur G. James Cancer Hospital and Richard J. Solove Research Institute in collaboration with the Harvard School of Public Health........ Scientists at Wake Forest University School of Medicine and the University of Wisconsin-Madison have discovered that some elevated prostate-specific antigen (PSA) levels in men appears to be caused by a hormone normally occurring in the body, and are not necessarily a predictor of the need for a prostate biopsy........ Twenty years of screening for breast and prostate cancer - the most diagnosed cancer for women and men - have not brought the anticipated decline in deaths from these diseases, argue experts from the University of California, San Francisco and the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio in an opinion piece reported in the "Journal of the American Medical Association"........ A small slice of RNA inhibits prostate cancer metastasis by suppressing a surface protein usually found on prostate cancer stem cells. A research team led by researchers at The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center reported today in an advance online publication at Nature Medicine "Our findings are the first to profile a microRNA expression pattern in prostate cancer stem cells and also establish a strong rationale for developing the microRNA miR-34a as a new therapy option for prostate cancer," said senior author Dean Tang, Ph.D., professor in MD Anderson's Department of Molecular Carcinogenesis........ Scientists at Moores Cancer Center at the University of California, San Diego and his colleagues have observed that prostate cancer therapys varied significantly between county hospitals and private providers. Patients treated in county hospitals are more likely to undergo surgery while patients treated in private facilities tend to receive radiation or hormone treatment. These findings were published online by the journal Cancer on January 25........