The 2017 Moyad + Scholz Mid-Year Update was an incredible and enlightening experience. Conferences hosted by the PCRI are created to provide education, empowerment, and support for all attendees. This year, patients and caregivers came together to learn the most recent, accurate information on prostate cancer, have the opportunity to ask questions directly to speakers, and find a peaceful environment to interact with others who understand their situation.

Focal therapy is a treatment option for men with specific types of localized disease. This treatment attempts to ablate areas of the prostate that contain cancer, while sparing healthy tissue. This article covers both technical and practical information about HIFU.

Interpreting a Pathology Report By Jonathan Epstein, MD | Johns Hopkins University

Patients should personally review their pathology report; the expert description of the information obtained from the needle biopsy. In this article, Dr. Epstein answers 15 common questions about understanding a pathology report.

New prostate cancer drugs come to market quite rarely because the studies mandated by the FDA cost hundreds of millions of dollars. The FDA requires these studies to randomly allocate men into two comparison groups. One group receives the new medicine being tested. The other group gets an ineffective fake, called a placebo. Assuming the study is performed in an acceptable manner, the FDA will approve a new drug for commercial use, only if the men who are receiving the new medicine outlive those treated with the placebo by a specified margin without excessive toxicity.

Selecting a treatment for prostate cancer is increasingly complex. In an effort to help my prostate cancer patients navigate the complexities of this process, I routinely frame the discussion around these three rules:

Rule #1: If you listen to enough people you will hear just about anything.

The surprising finding, after 12 years, was that there was no difference in survival between surgery and watchful waiting in the Low-Risk or in the Intermediate-Risk group.  On the other hand, men who were in the High-Risk category did benefit with improved 12-year survival when treated with immediate surgery compared to the men with High-Risk disease who did watchful waiting.