Always keep in mind that one million times zero equals zero.
- Manlobbi
Halls of Shrewd'm / Atheist Shrewds
No. of Recommendations: 4
Guys, get a PSA test.
Rick Steves Recalls ‘Feeling So Good’ Before Surprising Prostate Cancer Diagnosis
https://www.today.com/health/disease/rick-steves-p..."The travel writer and host of 'Rick Steves Europe' shares an update after prostate cancer diagnosis to encourage men to 'say the word(s) prostate cancer.'"
Looks like Rick caught it early. My step-mom's brother diagnosed recently. Age 75, stage 4, in the bones.
No. of Recommendations: 4
Get the annual check. As undignified as it is. The PSA is just a blood test which they can throw in with the routine panels for your annual check-up.
As I understand it, PC has very few symptoms until it's too late. "Feeling good" isn't really an accurate gauge.
1poorMIL has kidney cancer. But it's slow-moving, so they don't want to do anything. They just monitor it. They expect she will expire before it becomes a problem. She feels fine, at least as far as her kidneys are concerned. They only caught it by chance.
No. of Recommendations: 4
I posted this over at TMF when there was a discussion on the value of the PSA test.
My doc did annual prostate exams both digitally and PSA blood draw throughout my 50s and 60s up until I was just about to turn 67. Nothing showed up until 2017 when my PSA spiked. He hadn’t felt anything unusual so he put me on an antibiotic and checked it again in a month. It was up a little bit more. The next step was a biopsy. That showed a fairy aggressive cancer. I opted for robotic assisted surgery. For 18 months, I had PSA blood tests done every 6 months that showed undetectable levels of PSA. Then on my 2 year anniversary, the test showed levels that shouldn’t have been there. Some of the cancer cells had been missed in the surgery and had started producing the antigen at a level that was detectable. Over then next 3 months, ending right before the COVID lockdown, I had 39 sessions of radiation to zap those cells. Since then, no PSA has been detected. I am on an annual PSA test now. I’ll find out in December if things are still good. Was the PSA test overused in my case? I don’t know. But I do feel that without it I would not be typing this post today.
No. of Recommendations: 0
Hope the radiation zapped them all, PucksFool.
My PSA spiked last year (6.7). Did all the tests, and all came back clear. PSA was down a bit last month (5.1), still high.
I'm on a 6mo PSA check, which is no big deal since I have to have blood drawn then anyway.
Though the tests are no fun I'm glad I did them.
No. of Recommendations: 4
The change in recommendation around prostate cancer screening about ten years ago is hard to comprehend. Up until that time, there was a steady decrease in the rate of prostate CA death as treatments were refined. Someone somewhere thought the number of cases treated to save one life were too high, one assumes.
Prostate cancer is a funny animal. We have tried to grade the aggressiveness of biopsy samples with a Gleeson score to pick out the dangerous ones. It has really not been that successful unless the scores are at the extremes. Most biopsies return a score of 6-7, looking not only at the cell morphology but also the tissue architecture as well.
So what are the odds of a Gleeson 6-7 being an aggressive cancer or a cancer you will die with and not of? Nobody knows. It would be unethical to randomize cancer patients to that study without letting them choose whether to treat or not.
From my personal perspective, a 1 in 10 risk is unacceptable, considering the lingering and painful death that comes with aggressive prostate cancer. 1 in 20, still unacceptable to me. 1 in 50, maybe, but wouldn't you feel especially bad if you got the aggressive cancer?
What we do know is that prostate cancer death rate has fallen steadily since the 50's. I recommended annual PSA and DRE to any that asked for my opinion.
fd
