Funny, in a sad way: Man 'cured' of prostate cancer with Testosterone

[Mark Rippetoe]

Man 'cured' of prostate cancer after doctors shock tumour to death with testosterone

[mike]

Man 'cured' of prostate cancer after doctors shock tumour to death with testosterone*

"The facts | Prostate cancer: One in eight men will be diagnosed in their lifetime"


thought it was a given if you lived long enough --- and that you'd ultimately die of something else (hence the "watchful waiting")

nah, take it back - american cancer society:

Other than skin cancer, prostate cancer is the most common cancer in American men.

About 1 man in 7 will be diagnosed with prostate cancer during his lifetime.

Prostate cancer develops mainly in older men. About 6 cases in 10 are diagnosed in men aged 65 or older, and it is rare before age 40. The average age at the time of diagnosis is about 66.

[Scaldrew]

This reminds me of when Goku and Vegeta volitionally overloaded the Big Gete Star in the movie The Return of Cooler. See, Cooler wanted to fuel the Big Gete Star to grow more powerful and captured Goku and Vegeta in order to steal their energy. But when the tank was full and Cooler released his captives to let them die horribly, Goku and Vegeta took hold of the restraints which were used to siphon their energy and kept charging the Big Gete Star on purpose so as to overload it causing it to malfunction. This malfunction angered Cooler and he went for the kill, but Goku proved too much and he sploded. It's actually one of the better DBZ movies as there isn't some incredibly boring and predictable plot contrivance at the end to solve all their problems and the metaphor of the Big Gete Star being like a tumor consuming the host planet is a nice touch.

I don't know, Coach. Capped delts, penile unit taking up a lower space on the Y-axis in relation to the scrotum, and a lack of cancer in the balls. What's so sad about all that? Sounds like getting away with murder if you ask me.

[MBasic]

Our goal is to shock the cancer cells by exposing them rapidly to very high followed by very low levels of testosterone in the blood

. . . this don't sound fun, but hey, it worked

[curlrackhog]

Dr Matt Hobbs, deputy director of research at the charity Prostate Cancer UK, said: "Drugs that reduce the levels of testosterone (androgen deprivation therapy) are an effective treatment for thousands of men with advanced prostate cancer.

"However, at some point the cancer evolves and those drugs stop working."

I'm way out of my depth here, but it sounds like BS (to my under-informed brain) that the cancer cells in a single patient themselves evolve that quickly. Is this actually happening?

[FatButWeak]

I thought the science was moving toward an understanding that it was elevated levels of estradiol that exacerbated prostate cancer, not testosterone.

The relation is that test aromatizes into estradiol, and that high levels of exogenous test aromtize into higher levels of estradiol, unless thwarted by an aromatase inhibitor. No?

[Austin Baraki]

I'm way out of my depth here, but it sounds like BS (to my under-informed brain) that the cancer cells in a single patient themselves evolve that quickly. Is this actually happening?

Yes, it is. Tumor "evolution" is different from the slow, lurching evolution of species that you're probably thinking of.

[m_sporkboy]

I'm way out of my depth here, but it sounds like BS (to my under-informed brain) that the cancer cells in a single patient themselves evolve that quickly. Is this actually happening?

Tumors tend to be fairly heterogeneous. So it would not surprise me if a drug worked on a subset of cells in a tumor and stopped working when those were dead.

But IANAD.

[Suwannee Dave]

It has been said that most men die with prostate cancer, but very few die because of it.