Dr. Daniel George on PSA Recurrence

Dr. Daniel James George is Professor of Medicine and Professor in Surgery at Duke University.

Prostatepedia spoke with him recently about biochemically recurrent prostate cancer.

Have you had any patients whose cases have changed either how you view your own role as a doctor or how you view the art of medicine?

Dr. Daniel George: As we evolve new therapies and indications for treatment, it’s really interesting how that affects our relationships with patients. As an oncologist, my relationships with patients have become more longitudinal. What I mean by that is: people are living longer than ever. I’m beginning to recognize my treatments in the context of not just the short-term endpoint of how to control my patient’s disease in the next few months but in terms of the ramifications for his life and long-term survival. What does it mean in terms of his functional well-being, not simply now, but in a year from now or five to ten years from now?

In many ways, it comforts patients to hear the perspective, that I see them as a long-term survivor, and that I’m thinking about the implications of our treatments in a long-term perspective. That helps the patient invest in his own life and well-being for the long-term, whether that be diet, exercise, sleep, or all these other behavioral interventions that can really impact their quality of life.

You’re basically saying that prostate cancer is becoming more of a chronic disease.

Dr. George: It has been for some patients, and we’re beginning to recognize it more and more for all patients.

We used to think of short-term goals for some of our most advanced cases of prostate cancer—just in terms of disease control or palliation and not worry about the long-term implications of treatment. While on the other end of the spectrum we would have cases where we don’t have to treat the disease at all or maybe treat it minimally in others. Now I’m recognizing prostate cancer as a chronic disease for everybody, and so everybody needs to think of the long-term implications of treatments.

Likewise, we need to think of the implications of our sequential therapies and their cumulative side effects.

Can you define M0 prostate cancer, or biochemically recurrent prostate cancer, for patients?

Dr. George: This is probably confusing because of its name. We refer to prostate cancer in terms of stage. Stage refers to the extent of the disease. The Gleason Score or grade refers to how it looks under the microscope, its aggressiveness. But stage refers to the progression of this disease. Do they have bone metastases? Do they have distant lymph node metastases or other sites of disease? Or is it localized?

We usually use three categories: the T stage, which is the localized tumor, the N stage, which is the lymph node status, and then the M stage, which is the presence of metastases that are distant from the prostate. M0 refers to patients who have no distant metastasis. Think of M0 in terms of patients who are newly diagnosed with prostate cancer.

Recurrent prostate cancer patients are those who’ve had local therapy, surgery, or radiation, and who now have evidence of disease recurrence by PSA. After these treatments, we know that your PSA should be 0 or very low, and it should stay low. If your PSA rises and continues to rise, that’s an indication of disease recurrence. Yet, in many cases, they’re what we call M0 because, when we stage the patient with a bone scan or a CT scan, we can’t see any evidence of cancer. Many of those patients have what we might otherwise refer to as microscopic metastatic disease, disease that’s just below the level of detection. Some of them could have local recurrence or recurrence just within the pelvis and regional nodes that’s not distant. We now know from recent studies that the majority of those patients are going to relapse with distant metastatic disease. In other words, they have distant metastatic disease, but it’s just below the level of detection.

So, this is a bit of a misnomer because we’re treating them with systemic whole-body treatment therapy now because we recognize the risk of distant metastatic disease for the majority of these patients. We’re beginning to use newer imagining techniques, such as PET scans, that could be more sensitive at picking up this microscopic metastatic disease. That shouldn’t deter us from applying the current data to that patient population.

I think of M0 prostate cancer as being low-volume castrate resistant prostate cancer. When we think of it that way, it makes sense that the drugs we’re using work and work even better in that low-volume population. We should use them because M0 is just an early continuation of that metastatic process.

What are these systemic approaches that patients are likely to receive? What are the implications down the line in terms of side effects, and in terms of the longer longitudinal quality of life issues you mentioned earlier?

Dr. George: This is an important aspect of the care for these patients because we have two studies—and a third will soon be reported—that demonstrate a clinical benefit from using what we have broadly termed secondary hormonal therapies, therapies that we add to primary androgen deprivation (ADT) or testosterone suppression.

Patients for whom testosterone suppression has failed can respond to another hormonal intervention later. These are drugs that target the androgen receptor, the protein that testosterone binds to, and inhibits it from signaling. It shuts off what seems to be the most common mechanism for resistance to testicular testosterone suppression. That is an overexpression or overabundance of this receptor, which makes prostate cancer cells sensitive to low levels of residual testosterone in the body.

Xtandi (enzalutamide) and Erleada (apalutamide), in two separate Phase III studies, have demonstrated a clinically significant benefit: a delay in the time to metastasis. The FDA has accepted this as a meaningful endpoint because of the degree of delay. It was associated with about a two-year delay in the time to metastasis in this population.

Patients who were at high risk for developing metastatic disease were in the control arm and developing metastatic disease within about a year of coming on the study for the placebo arm. For the treatment arms, with Xtandi (enzalutamide) or Erleada (apalutamide), we’re seeing a delay of about two additional years. That means three years until the time of metastasis.

The results suggest that we’ve changed the progression of this disease dramatically. In addition, both studies showed a strong trend in favor of the treatment arm for improved overall survival associated with this delay in metastasis. Even though the data may not be as complete because it takes a longer time to report, we’re seeing this correlation in metastasis-free survival, if you will.

Again, I caution the semantics here because these patients do have metastases; they just can’t be seen yet. But the delay in that radiographic appearance of metastasis is associated with an improved survival.

What’s the approach to finding smaller metastases earlier on with the newer imaging techniques? And if they are very small, do you treat them aggressively with radiation, do you continue using the systemic therapies, or do you use a combination?

Dr. George: There is a mix of presentations of patients. When we image with a novel PET-imaging tracer, we’re going to see more than one site of disease in most patients. We’re going to see multiple lymph nodes, multiple bone metastases, or maybe lymph and bone metastases.

For a subset of about 20 percent of patients, we see this disease limited to only lymph node disease or only one or two bone metastases. We refer to this as oligometastatic disease, which we have yet to biologically define. Clinically, we know that it’s associated with a longer survival.

Oligometastatic prostate cancer raises the question of whether or not these patients could be managed with therapy localized to those sites, therapy that does not necessarily expose them to further systemic therapy. We don’t have a lot of data in the castrate-resistant setting, but in the hormone-naïve setting, there are some data that suggest that there can be a delay in the time to initiating subsequent hormonal therapy by doing that.

There’s a study out of Europe, but the median effect was relatively small, just a few months. It’s not clear that this is going to be a meaningful difference for most patients, but it is something that can be discussed.

A lot of those treatment approaches can be done with minimal intervention, external radiation, ablations, or limited surgery. Those will be options. But in the majority of these patients that we do this molecular imaging for, we’re going to find evidence of more than one site of disease or multiple lesions. This suggests that they need a systemic therapy approach.

It’s reasonable to extrapolate this data because we know from the placebo arm of these studies that these patients went on to develop metastases in their bone scan or CT scan within months, 50 percent of them within a year, and many of them in just a few months of their subsequent scan. The likelihood is, if we’d done the molecular imaging at baseline on these patients,we would have seen it. Yet still, in this population, we’re seeing a treatment effect.

We see the treatment effect regardless of what level of PSA doubling time you have. In patients who have a PSA doubling time of just two or three months, we see a dramatic treatment effect. In patients who have a doubling effect of eight or ten months, we still see a dramatic treatment effect in terms of prolongation in the time to metastasis—fewer events in those cases, but still, we see that treatment effect.

The PSA doubling time is an important parameter that we’re using now, in addition to these imaging stats, to determine who we should treat with these drugs and their prognosis.

Isn’t doubling time an indication of the aggressiveness of the disease?

Dr. George: It is. We knew this earlier in disease prior to hormones. PSA doubling time was very prognostic for time to metastasis and overall survival. It’s been less studied in the castrate-resistant setting, when patients have progressed on primary hormonal therapy, but we’re still seeing it there. In fact, the results are really dramatic.

There were some abstracts at the Genitourinary Cancer Symposium (GU ASCO) around this data. There have been reports from these two Phase III studies with Xtandi (enzalutamide) and Erleada (apalutamide) that demonstrate this. We believe there is a strong correlation between a shorter PSA doubling time—a shorter time to bone metastasis—and shorter overall survival.

Just to put these studies into context, the requirements were that PSA doubling times were less than ten months. If doubling time is a year or longer, these are slow-growing cancers. Even though they’re castrate-resistant, these are patients who will live for many years with no metastasis, so it’s reasonable just to observe their disease. For the studies, the median or 50th percentile PSA doubling time was around four months. That’s really short and aggressive.

That’s why we saw that the average time to metastasis was just about a year in the control arms. It’s important to recognize where your patient is in this continuum because it guides whether we should treat him like we did on the study, or if their disease is too slow growing to justify the treatment.

What other considerations are important for patients who fall into this category?

Dr. George: The important thing for patients to know: not to worry. I know that as a physician, it’s easy to say ‘don’t worry about your rising PSA level,’ but as a patient, it is hard to ignore.

Join us to read the rest of Dr. George’s comments about biochemically recurrent prostate cancer.

Advertisement

Join A Clinical Trial For Biochemically Recurrent Prostate Cancer

Dr. Rahul Aggarwal is an Associate Clinical Professor of Medicine in the University of California, San Francisco Genitourinary Oncology and Developmental Therapeutics programs. He’s keenly interested in developing novel therapeutics and imaging strategies for men with advanced prostate cancer.

Dr. Aggarwal is a Co-Investigator in the ongoing Prostate Cancer Foundation’s Stand Up To Cancer-funded West Coast Dream Team prostate cancer consortium.

Prostatepedia spoke with him about his clinical trial on hormonal annihilation in men with high-risk biochemically recurrent prostate cancer.

Not a member? Join us.

What is the thinking behind your clinical trial on hormonal annihilation in men with high-risk biochemically recurrent prostate cancer?

Dr. Aggarwal: This trial is for patients with prostate cancer who previously had what we call a radical prostatectomy, or the prostate was removed, as their primary treatment and then subsequently had evidence of cancer recurrence as indicated by a rising PSA. We’re specifically looking at patients with a PSA that is rising quickly with a PSA doubling time of nine months or less.

We know that this group of patients is at risk for subsequent development of metastases as well as at risk for prostate cancer-related mortality. One standard treatment approach is to use intermittent hormone therapy, which can suppress the cancer for a period of time. Inevitably, though, the cancer becomes hormone or castration-resistant.

Once that happens, patients have fewer treatment options remaining and a shorter prognosis.

The main goal of the study is to use some of the more potent hormonal therapies that have been developed, including Zytiga (abiraterone) and Erleada (apalutamide). and apply them to this situation to see if we can durably suppress the patients’ prostate cancer in a finite period of treatment. Rather than treating indefinitely, we treat everyone on the study for 12 months, and then we stop and let their testosterone levels recover and any side effects related to hormone therapy stop or lessen. Hopefully, we can see long-term control of patients’ PSA levels or maybe for some prevent the need for future treatment.

In this way you would also lessen some of the side effects associated with these treatments?

Dr. Aggarwal: Exactly. Then the total duration, or percent time, spent on hormone therapy would be shorter. Even though we’re giving more potent hormone therapy, this would actually translate into less overall treatment and less medical burden from a side effect perspective. Some of the other studies that have come out using medicines like Zytiga (abiraterone) and Erleada (apalutamide) in the hormone sensitive or castration resistant settings do seem to suggest there is a benefit to giving these medicines earlier in the treatment course. I think it fits with what we’re seeing in terms of the general trends in the use of these medicines and the management of prostate cancer.

What can a patient expect to happen step by step if he ends up participating?

Dr. Aggarwal: The treatment phase of the study consists of monthly visits for a year in which patients are getting hormone injections. Then it is a randomized study, so in the standard of care arm men would be getting the hormone injections alone once a month for a year. Then there are two experimental, or investigational, arms with added hormonal therapy. One arm has added Erleada (apalutamide). The third arm adds Erleada (apalutimide) plus Zytiga (abiraterone).

Patients have a two in three chance of being on one of the added hormonal treatment arms.

This is an open label trial, meaning there is no placebo. Everyone will get active treatment, so there’s no risk that their PSA levels won’t go down. Every patient responds initially to hormone therapy, or nearly everyone. We see patients monthly for hormone treatments. We evaluate them for side effects. At four or five time points throughout the study, we have patients fill out questionnaires regarding their symptoms. We do want to understand from a patient perspective what quality of life and symptoms are like during the course of treatment.

After one year of treatment, assuming the PSA is not rising, patients will then enter a follow-up phase which we try to make easy. We check patients’ PSA and testosterone levels once a month, but we don’t require any mandated in-person visits to allow more flexibility for those who live far away from the study center where they were treated.

At the time that the PSA rises to above 0.2, that’s the cut off for what we call PSA progression, which is the primary endpoint of the study. After that treatment is per the discretion of the patient and treating doctor. We still follow patients long term for metastases free and overall survival. The treatment options at that point are completely up to whatever is decided upon between the patient and his doctor. It’s flexible on the backend too if his PSA were to rise.

Join us to learn more about Dr. Aggarwal’s trial and how to participate.

Prostate Cancer Dormancy + Disseminated Tumor Cells

Dr. Julio Aguirre Ghiso is a Professor of Medicine, Hematology and Medical Oncology and Oncological Sciences at Ichan School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York City. His research explores why and how in some patients disseminated tumor cells can remain dormant for years after initial treatment before reactivating to form incurable metastases.

Prostatepedia spoke with him about his research and about a clinical trial testing his findings that is currently looking for prostate cancer patients.

To  learn about a clinical trial for prostate cancer patients that Dr. Aguirre-Ghiso is running: Join us or download the issue.

Why did you become involved in cancer research? What is it about cancer research that has kept you interested?

Dr. Julio Aguirre-Ghiso: When I was an undergraduate student, I was looking for challenging problems to solve in biology. Serendipitously, I started working and volunteering for a cancer biology team in Argentina, where I trained. I became very interested. I was working on tumor immunology. Then I became very interested in the cell biology of cancer cells. At some point, I realized that it didn’t really matter if it was cancer or Alzheimer’s or some other basic biological questions on other organisms; what I really was curious about was solving tough problems and answering questions. This was a good mix where, if I were able to do it, I would also be helping people with cancer in the future.

Focusing on cancer would give me an opportunity to apply my curiosity to something that is relevant for people. That was the original intention. Since I was not an MD, my curiosity was about mostly biological questions. This was a fitting problem to go after.

Let’s talk about the concept of disseminated tumor cells. Can you explain to us how that works and how it is related to the development of metastasis?

Dr. Aguirre-Ghiso: Patients usually present with what’s called a primary tumor. That’s the first cancer lesion ever found in that patient. At that time, doctors will do certain tests on that primary tumor to understand if it had gone through certain changes that would make it able to spread. When cancer cells grow, they may acquire certain abilities that allow them to spread from that primary site—from, let’s say, the prostrate or the breast—to other parts of the body.

The disseminated tumor cells are these cells that have spread throughout the body. They have disseminated from the primary tumor to other organs in the body. Those could be the bones; the liver; the brain; or the lung. When they arrive to those organs, they’re not immediately able to grow. Since they’re usually solitary cells–that’s how we find them in the patient samples and in the mouse models that we’ve used—we call them disseminated tumor cells. They’re not yet metastases, but they’re not in the primary tumor. They’ve left and arrived to other organs. That’s the definition of these disseminated tumor cells.

Why are they important? We and others have provided compelling evidence that these cells are the source of the metastases. Those are the cells, not all of them, but some of them, that are able to eventually grow into metastases that affect the functioning of the organ, and sometimes systemically, the functioning of the patient. That’s what leads to death. That’s why these cells are important.

Do all disseminated tumor cells eventually grow into metastases?

Dr. Aguirre-Ghiso: No.

How do you know which disseminated tumor cells are going to grow into metastases and which are not?

Dr. Aguirre-Ghiso: Well, that’s been a major challenge and a major push from my program: to try to get in early and identify those disseminated tumor cells so that we have some idea if a patient carries disseminated tumor cells that are not going to do anything and the patient doesn’t have to worry, or if the patient carries some cells that look like they’re switching and they’re going to form metastases.

That has been our goal. It’s not yet a clinical test, but that’s why we have pushed the boundaries of our research to get to that point as fast as possible because we think that instead of waiting and not doing anything or treating blindly and then waiting until those metastases grow, we can intervene earlier. We would like to be able to say that this patient has only dormant cells and they don’t look like they’re going to reactivate based on certain markers or gene signatures.

That patient would then only need to be monitored, but new treatments may allow eliminating even those cells. If another patient has a mixture of cells some of which are fully dormant and some of which look like proliferative cells, we would treat him in a different way.

We have provided data for this from our mouse models and from clinical patient samples in prostate cancer. We published two papers in 2014 and in 2015 on this.

Not all cells are going to grow.

In fact, if you look at early lesions in breast cancer, for example, disseminated tumor cells are found in the bone marrow of 13-15% of women with ductal carcinoma in situ but only a small fraction of that 13-15% will develop metastases. It’s not a given that if these cells are there they’re going to grow, but if they are there, there is a higher risk of metastases. That has been proven by large population studies that have been published in The New England Journal of Medicine. This is true for not only breast cancer but for other cancers as well. The goal and the challenge is to have enough information to be able to predict accurately what those cells are going to do when you detect them.

Where we are in the timeline of being able to predict which patient is carrying potentially dangerous disseminated cancer cells and which is carrying dormant disseminated cancer cells?

Dr. Aguirre-Ghiso: We have different areas of research into these disseminated tumor cells. Why they are dormant? Why do they sleep in the body for a long time and then awaken? We discovered a marker in 2015 that could distinguish these deep-sleeping cells in both prostate cancer and breast cancer models. If the cells had this marker, they would behave in this dormant way, and if they didn’t have this marker, they would look more like a proliferative or an about-to-reactivate cancer cell.

At that time, it was correlative between just two groups of patients. Last year, we published a paper on breast cancer where we used the same marker detected in tumor cells disseminated to the bone marrow of breast cancer patients. We were able to show that if patients had this marker they were much less likely to relapse with bone metastases than if they didn’t have this marker. In 2015, we’ve published the original finding where we just said this is probably a good marker; we understand how it works in mouse models. In 2018, we showed that the presence of the markers can distinguish retrospectively how patients behaved. Now the challenge is for people to start using the markers prospectively to see if it helps them make decisions on how to treat or monitor patients. We are very much at the early stages of applying the information that we have generated and bringing it into the clinic.

On the other hand, in that same 2015 paper, we were able to show that if we use two drugs that are FDA-approved and combine them in sequence, we can turn on these dormancy mechanisms in different types of cancer cells—i.e. breast, prostate, and head and neck cancer cells. Because these drugs were available—and there are independent studies showing that when prostate cancer patients are treated with hormonal therapy and anti-androgens, they turn on this marker of dormancy that tells you the cancer is deciding to go into sleeping mode— we wondered if we could repurpose those drugs and treat prostate cancer patients at risk of developing metastases to see if we could delay the onset of metastasis and keep the disseminated tumor cells in a dormant state.

To read the rest of our conversation and to learn about a clinical trial for prostate cancer patients that Dr. Aguirre-Ghiso is running: Join us. Or download the issue.

Dr. Maha Hussain On Biochemical Recurrence

Dr. Maha Hussain is the Genevieve Teuton Professor of Medicine in the Division of Hematology, Department of Medicine, and the Deputy Director of the Robert H. Lurie Comprehensive Cancer Center of the Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine.

Prostatepedia spoke with her recently about biochemically recurrent prostate cancer.

What is biochemical recurrence?

Dr. Hussain: A biochemical recurrence implies that an individual with prostate cancer who has received therapy now has evidence of disease activity as reflected by their PSA blood test. In the context of negative imaging, the PSA is a flag. It generally indicates a relapse. Generally speaking, when the patient has a rising PSA, they get imaged. If the scans are negative, then this becomes purely biochemical recurrence.

Why is this a disease state that we’re particularly focused on? What are some of the key issues in how we approach treating these men?

Dr. Hussain: There are two settings of biochemical recurrence. One is the non-metastatic hormone sensitive setting. This means a patient has had local therapy with surgery and their prostate was taken out, or they’ve had radiation therapy with or without hormonal treatment, and now they have a PSA that’s going up. This implies there is cancer activity. Generally, imaging is done, and most of the time, conventional imaging such as bone and CAT scan are negative.

While not imminently harmful, non-metastatic hormone sensitive biochemical recurrence has significant psychological implications for the patient because it reminds them that there is cancer activity in their body that’s growing.

With regard to management, salvage radiation plus hormone therapy is the standard of care for patients who developed PSA-only relapse post radical prostatectomy as it reduces risk of mets and improves longevity. While there are options for patients who had radiation therapy plus hormonal therapy, they are not optimal.

For example, while hormone therapy is an option for patients whose PSA started to increase after salvage radiation and hormonal therapy, the totality of the data to date does not suggest significant benefit for early hormone therapy versus waiting until there’s a reason to treat.

This population; non-metastatic hormone sensitive PSA relapse, tends to live quite long, and some may not develop visible mets. The speed by which the PSA starts to go up and how fast it increases—what we call doubling time—can imply earlier versus later development of metastatic disease. Detailed discussion is needed to address options, pros and cons of treatment, and potential options for clinical trials.

The other setting of biochemical recurrence is the non-metastatic but castrate-resistant setting, which differs from the previous setting in that patients were treated with hormone therapy and now their PSA is rising while on therapy; that is the rising PSA is occurring despite the fact that hormone therapy has lowered their testosterone levels to the castration range. This is a different clinical phase of disease where the cancer has shown that it is no longer responsive biologically to the hormonal therapy that they are receiving. We know that, given enough time, cancer will show up. We know also that the speed by which the cancer is growing, as reflected by the PSA rate of increase, has an implication as to how soon the cancer will show up on the scans.

This is an area of an unmet need for decades, until last year when two drugs were FDA-approved for this particular patient population, specifically Erleada (apalutamide) and Xtandi (enzalutamide) based on significantly delaying time to development of metastasis. At this year’s American Society of Clinical Oncology GU (ASCO GU) conference, there was also positive data from another trial with Darolutamide in this disease setting. I believe the drug is in front of the FDA at this moment for review.

These three trials were done in a population of patients who had a worse prognosis as reflected by their fast PSA doubling time—a doubling time of 10 months or less. This is because these patients are likely to show metastases within an average of about two to two and a half years.

The issue is whether there is benefit for people who don’t have that kind of PSA doubling time. What if the doubling time is one or two years? It certainly is an area where we need to think about value to that patient.

For both Erleada (apalutamide) and Xtandi (enzalutamide), the FDA approval did not specify the doubling time requirement. The FDA approved it in all patients who have non-metastatic castrate-resistant disease. Clearly one size does not fit all. It’s critical to make shared decisions between the patient and the treating physician with regard to the value of the treatment, the risks from the cancer, the risks from the treatment, the treatment objectives, and when to initiate therapy.

Some good news about this disease phase is, because it’s invisible cancer, and while this means there’s micrometastatic disease, the patient has some time to think about things and also monitor carefully.

In my experience, probably about 8 to 9 out of 10 patients elect to be on treatment because of the concern over worsening disease and the value based on the clinical trials. There are some patients who feel great, and if they’re not going to have an issue tomorrow, then they want to wait a few months before deciding on treatment. That’s perfectly reasonable.

Isn’t that true for a variety of situations in prostate cancer, that you have time to gather a variety of opinions?

Dr. Hussain: Correct in general, but specially for this disease space because no one is going to die overnight from a PSA that’s not controlled. That’s to put it bluntly. There is that room. Patients should talk with their physician about that and discuss risk-benefit ratios as all therapies have side effects.

For certain patients, those side effects might be more important, especially for those who have significant cardiovascular disease. It becomes important to incorporate risk-benefit and close monitoring, but it doesn’t mean that no treatment should ever be done.

Do you have any other advice for men in this situation?

Dr. Hussain: One thing to remember for men with hormone-sensitive biochemical recurrence who have had salvage therapy or post radiation and hormonal therapy is that if therapy is to be done, it ought to have a good reason. Lowering the PSA alone is not the objective; clinical benefit should be the objective.

There is potential harm from treatment in the absence of proof that giving hormone therapy for a PSA of let’s say 0.5 or 0.6 will have a benefit. One has to balance the risks from the treatment and both physical and monetary risks to the patient and ultimately implement a shared decision.

These conversations with patients can be long and potentially stressful to the patient. Yes, hormone therapy can be given. The issue is not whether it can be given but whether it should be given, and if so, when.

There’s a fair amount of population-based data that suggests there’s no clear advantage, but there’s limited prospective clinical trial data. I would encourage patients to discuss these issues with their physicians, understand the upsides and downsides, and also discuss opportunities for clinical trials. Clinical trials are one space in which we need informative data and partnerships with patients to come up with better answers.

For patients who had radical prostatectomy (surgical removal of the prostate), and then their PSA is going up, their best treatment option is salvage therapy, which involves radiation with hormonal treatment.

Based on the more recent data from Radiation Therapy Oncology Group (RTOG), the radiation involves the prostate bed and the pelvis to include the pelvic lymph nodes with four to six months of hormone treatment. This is something that should be discussed with the care team. Radiation alone is not enough, and certainly the data indicate the combination is better with regard to outcomes. If the patient doesn’t want to do the hormones, that’s fine, but the hormones can reduce risk of progression and potentially add to overall survival.

The other side would be situations where patients have had radiation therapy and have received hormonal treatment as part of their primary treatment. Then they stopped the therapy, and now months or years later, the PSA is rising. That’s a different scenario. The issue is whether to resume hormone therapy or not. That’s when a careful conversation is necessary between patients and their physician because there is no compelling data that say it’s necessary to do the hormone therapy.

So, there are a variety of situations.

Dr. Hussain: Yes and/or access to clinical trials. We know the phases of prostate cancer now. The same disease state now has multiple phases, and it’s becoming complicated. That’s important because this speaks to the importance of personalizing care for the patient at all levels.

We’re becoming more and more personalized about how we categorize the different disease states.

Dr. Hussain: Yes, absolutely, and we do individualize the care. A 50-year-old who comes in with non-metastatic castrate-resistant prostate cancer and no comorbidities has a very different disease than someone who is 85, had a stroke, and is in a wheelchair.

Patients should ask their physicians specifically about the type of biochemical recurrence they have, their expected prognosis based on their PSA doubling time, their risk-benefits ratio, and which scientific information from prospective clinical trials can help guide their decisions. Patients should ask for educational material, and doctors should help patients make a decision that’s not based on being afraid but being informed about the choices, pros, and cons.

Would you give similar recommendations to anyone along any stage of the disease progression?

Dr. Hussain: Absolutely. Informed decisions are critical in every disease setting. But biochemical recurrence is a complicated phase of disease. In the setting of metastatic disease, it’s relatively easy in that there is no question regarding the disease risks. Earlier therapy, before symptoms or before the disease worsens, is better generally. This a disease setting that is likely to cause harm if therapy is delayed significantly.

But with non-metastatic hormone sensitive biochemical relapse, a patient can go for years without having any visible metastasis. It’s more complicated when there’s no imminent danger. At the end of the day, I tell patients with non-metastatic hormone sensitive disease in whom there is no clear data to support benefit from systemic therapy, that this is a gray area where we don’t have compelling data to say that giving hormone treatment is going to give a meaningful benefit. Therefore, one option is we monitor closely with interval PSA checks and periodic imaging. Based on doubling times and trends, what new evidence that comes up, and patient comfort we can watch. Once the patient is informed about the specifics, it is fascinating that the majority tends to be comfortable with watching and about a third are not comfortable with not getting therapy. There is not a one-size-fits-all approach. Personalized shared decision is critical.

Not a member? Join us to read more conversations about PSA recurrence.

Biochemical Recurrence

In March, we’re talking about biochemical recurrence.

Dr. Snuffy Myers frames the issue for us below.

Not a member? Join us to read conversations with Drs. Daniel George, Pedro Barata, Julio Aguirre-Ghiso, and Rahul Aggarwal.

This issue focuses on treatment issues for men with an increasing PSA after prostatectomy or prostate radiation. In this introduction, I will review some basic concepts that should help you follow the discussion more easily.

If surgery has successfully removed the prostate gland, the only source of PSA will be surviving cancer cells. After radiation, there can be normal prostate cells in addition to cancer cells. However, prostate cancer cells differ from normal prostate cells because the cancer cells are able to grow in a particular manner. Cancer cells grow by doubling: 1 cell becomes 2; 2 become 4; 4 become 8. Cancer cells do this at a constant rate.

For example, if the cancer cells double every year, then on subsequent years, the number of cancer cells would be 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, 256, and so on. As a general rule, it takes 15 doublings to go from 1 cancer cell to a mass 1 centimeter across. At 1 centimeter, cancer masses generally become detectable by CT scan. As a rough rule of thumb, it takes another 15 doublings to reach a lethal cancer burden.

The implication is that half of the cancer growth occurs below the level of detectability.

Unlike most cancers, our ability to follow prostate cancer is not limited to imaging tools like the

CT or bone scans. We have PSA as a biochemical marker that can be used to follow the cancer. The PSA is a much more sensitive indicator of cancer presence than both CT or bone scan and can indicate the presence of recurrent cancer months to years earlier.

In most patients, the PSA level is roughly proportional to the size of the cancer mass: if the cancer doubles in size, the PSA will double. Thus, the PSA doubling time is thought to provide an estimate of the cancer doubling time. PSA doubling times faster than 3 months usually indicate rapidly growing disease associated with short survival unless treated aggressively. PSA doubling times slower than 9 months usually indicate much less aggressive cancers. PSA doubling times greater than two years are associated with prostate cancers that can take a decade or more to cause metastases detected by the scans.

As a result, it is common to see men after surgery or radiation who have an increasing PSA, but no other evidence of disease. In those patients, PSA doubling time represents the only well established tool to determine the aggressiveness of the cancer and how soon metastatic cancer might manifest itself.

PSA, however, provides no information about the location of the cancer. Is it present in bone, lymph node, liver, or lung? The recent advances in PET scans mean that the cancer can now be detected while it is much smaller than would be the case with CT or bone scan. However, clinical trials have yet to prove this early detection improves the outcome of treatment.

Finally, there is the problem of late relapses. After surgery, patients can have an undetectable PSA for years—even more than a decade— and then recur. What was going on during that silent interval and what changed to trigger recurrent cancer? This phenomenon is called cancer dormancy and is also reviewed in this issue.

Charles E. Myers, Jr., MD

Clinical Trial: Exercise For Metabolic Dysregulation After Prostate Cancer

Dr. Christina Dieli-Conwright is an Assistant Professor of Research in the University of Southern California’s Division of Biokinesiology and Physical Therapy.

She’s particularly interested in understanding physiologic mechanisms and designing exercise interventions for cancer patients.

Prostatepedia spoke with her about her clinical trial.

What is the thinking behind your clinical trial?

Dr. Dieli-Conwright: This study spawned from my interest in the side effects and changes that patients were experiencing as they underwent treatment. For some of the more prevalent cancers like breast, prostate, and colorectal cancer, there is literature to provide evidence that individuals are experiencing what I broadly call metabolic dysregulation, which encompasses things like gaining weight, insulin resistance, elevated inflammation, and elevated blood pressure.

Whether they have metabolic dysregulation before diagnosis or whether it develops during treatment, they are at higher risk for experiencing diseases like heart disease, diabetes, and obesity. In prostate cancer in particular, when men are prescribed androgen deprivation therapy, there are side effects to that therapy that lead to metabolic dysregulation.

If you look at individuals who exercise who have not had cancer, we know that exercise can successfully offset metabolic dysregulation. It can improve insulin resistance. It can reduce body composition changes, etc. We wanted to apply exercise to this particular population so that these patients may also experience the benefits of exercise.

If a man who’s reading this ends up participating, what can he expect to happen step by step?

Dr. Dieli-Conwright: This is a randomized controlled trial. Individuals will be randomized to either the exercise group, and receive a 16-week, 3 times a week exercise program immediately, or the delayed controlled group. Everybody eventually gets the exercise program, but the “exercise group” gets it first. The delayed controlled group gets the program 16 weeks later.

We ask them to come to our facility, which is here at University of Southern California, to exercise. We pair them one-on-one with a certified cancer exercise trainer. They perform both aerobic and resistance exercises for about one hour every time they come. They perform the exercises in an interval circuit training, high-intensity manner. We’ve done that so that we can really challenge the metabolic systems for energy balance that have been shown to be more effective at targeting metabolic dysregulation as to opposed, for instance, just walking on a treadmill for 60 minutes.

We do a number of tests at the beginning, middle, and end of the 16 weeks. Those tests involve a blood draw so that we can measure glucose and insulin, as well as triglycerides, cholesterol, and markers of inflammation. We measure blood pressure, waist circumference, and body composition so how much muscle and fat the patients have. We also measure bone density. We do a battery of what we call physical function tests: how fast can the man climb upstairs? How fast can he walk six meters? How many times he can sit to stand? We do what we call a cardiopulmonary exercise test to test their maximal fitness and we do a series of strength tests to see how strong their muscles are.

We give them a packet of questionnaires about quality of life, fatigue, depression, and other cancer-related symptoms.

We are measuring the whole gamut of health outcomes even though our main focus is on insulin resistance and metabolic dysregulation simply because that’s the precursor to diabetes and heart disease.

We retest those measures at Week 8 and Week 16. We do follow participants after the 16-week period is over. Regardless of what group they were in, we check on them four months later to see how they’re doing.

Are there any specific eligibility criteria that you want to call attention to?

Dr. Dieli-Conwright: The main thing is that they’re over the age of 18 and that they have been on androgen deprivation therapy for the previous 16 weeks. That’s just so that we can allow the medication to stabilize the hormones. We also look to see whether or not they have been exercising regularly. If they are highly trained from a fitness perspective, then they are not eligible, so we do actually look for people who are relatively sedentary who are not participating in a structured exercise program already. We do that because we are trying to reach out to people who may be at a higher need for these interventions.

Do you care if a man has had surgery or radiation for prostate cancer?

Dr. Dieli-Conwright: No, we do not, as long as the surgery or radiation is completed. If they’re actively on radiation or actively on chemotherapy we would wait until that treatment is done. Often we get calls from patients who are very enthusiastic and eligible, but then tell us they’re starting radiation next week. We have to wait until that treatment is over and they’re cleared by their oncologist for exercise.

Is there anything else you’d like patients to know either about this trial in particular or about exercise for cancer patients in general?

Dr. Dieli-Conwright: We’ve had a number of patients participate already. It’s been very successful. It’s safe. It’s feasible. Everybody’s enjoyed the program. We’ve had very high compliance to date—almost 100%.

But it’s a strong time requirement—3 times a week for 16 weeks—so I would just say that if anybody is interested, even if it’s just a small amount, to contact us. We have very flexible scheduling times and can accommodate exercise almost 24/7. We have a large staff and a number of trainers who are eager to help. We try not to turn anybody away because of scheduling and try to work around work schedules if that’s a concern.

We would love to take more patients.

Subscribe or download our February issue to read more about this trial.

 

Clinical Trial: Cardiovascular + Lifestyle Interventions For Prostate Cancer

Dr. Darryl Leong is a cardiologist and Assistant Professor in Medicine at Canada’s McMaster University. He’s particularly interested in the prevention, identification, and management of cardiovascular disease in those with complex diseases. He is also leading the development of a clinical research program for the evaluation and treatment of cardiovascular disease in patients with cancer at Juravinski Hospital.

Prostatepedia spoke with him about the RADICAL-PC clinical trial, which is a randomized intervention of cardiovascular and lifestyle risk factors in prostate cancer patients.

Why did you become a doctor?

Dr. Leong: Within a generation, our society has added 20 years of lifespan. This is consistent whether it’s in wealthy countries like the United States and Canada or in developing countries. We have been really successful in a short time at prolonging people’s lives, and so the science that went behind that was really interesting to me.

When you look at the history of the world, in hundreds of millions of years, I don’t think any species has seen such a lengthening in their life expectancy in such a short period of time. I hope to build on that with our research and help to improve not just life expectancy but also people’s quality of life.

Would you tell us about the thinking behind your clinical trial?

We read some papers that came from the United States and Europe that suggest two things. First, men with prostate cancer seem to have quite a high risk of developing cardiovascular disease, heart attacks, and strokes during the course of their follow-up.

Second, there might be a link between (hormonal) androgen deprivation therapy (ADT) and the occurrence of these sorts of cardiovascular events. So, our thoughts turned to cardiovascular disease and prostate cancer. We proposed a study to the charitable organization Prostate Cancer Canada that supports research to understand why this link exists. We were fortunate enough that Prostate Cancer Canada agreed to fund our proposal, and so that’s how we came to study over 2,000 men with prostate cancer in Canada.

We’d like to expand this research internationally because we know that what happens in one country may not necessarily reflect what’s happening in another country. We have ongoing efforts to try to expand.

What will you be doing in the study? Should a man reading elect to participate what can he expect to happen?

Dr. Leong: One level of involvement, which we would ask of anyone who is interested in being involved in the study, is that we collect information about you, and we follow up with you over time. We hope that period of time will be at least another three years. If we are successful in getting more funding, we’d like to make it long term.

At the beginning, we collect information about health, cardiovascular disease, and risk factors that people have today, as well as information about physical characteristics, muscle strength, fitness, and a range of factors like that. Then we follow up with folks over the years to see if people develop cardiovascular disease or heart attacks and strokes and what predisposes people to these complications.

In addition to monitoring for cardiovascular disease, and because this is an opportunity to see whether we can make a difference to the cardiovascular disease rates in men with prostate cancer, we decided that people within the RADICAL-PC who give consent would be randomly allocated into one of two groups.

One group would receive usual care. Their medical care would not be changed at all. They would continue to see their general practitioner and their cancer specialist. The other group would be allocated to see a cardiologist on top of their usual care. The cardiologist would be instructed to provide very focused interventions to reduce cardiovascular risk. So, this is a trial built into the RADICAL-PC trial to see whether or not we can reduce cardiovascular events in these men.

Are there any specific eligibility criteria?

Dr. Leong: The criteria are simple. All we ask is that they’re over 45 years of age, and that either their prostate cancer has been diagnosed within the past year, or they’ve started hormonal therapy within the past six months or have a plan to start it in the next month.

To learn more about this trial, read our February issue.

Join A Clinical Trial: Casodex (bicalutamide) + Metformin

Dr. Marijo Bilusic is the director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Hematology Oncology Fellowship, and an Associate Research Physician in the Genitourinary Malignancies Branch, Center for Cancer Research,

National Cancer Institute (NCI). He’s keenly interested in tumor immunology and in developing prostate cancer treatments using novel target agents, therapeutic cancer vaccines, antibodies or immune modulations.

Prostatepedia spoke with him about a trial he’s running that looks at men with prostate cancer on Casodex (bicalutamide) with or without metformin.

Not a member? Join us!

Would you walk us through the thinking behind your trial looking at Casodex (bicalutamide) with or without metformin?

Dr. Marijo Bilusic: A former prostate cancer patient of mine had had surgery and his prostate was removed. Then his PSA kept rising, and he was not very keen about hormonal therapy, which was recommended by other oncologists he’d seen before me. I met him, and we talked about what to do. “We’re just going to observe you for now,” I said. “Try to exercise, lose some weight, and make healthy lifestyle changes. We’ll see you back in three months, and we’ll see what your PSA’s doing.”

In three months, he came back, and his PSA was 50 percent less than before. It went from 4 to 2.

I was impressed. I asked him, “What did you do?” “I followed your instructions.” “Lots of people follow my instructions,” I said, “but I’ve never seen anybody have PSA decline just with exercise and diet change. Any other changes from the last time we met?”

“I’ve also been taking metformin,” he said. “I read that metformin can help people with prostate cancer and asked my primary care physician to prescribe it, even though I was not diabetic.” It’s important to note that metformin is not something that we would recommend to prostate cancer patients outside of a clinical trial, yet. That’s why we’re running this study-to learn more about how metformin works and who it may work for.

I was surprised, and grew curious about a potential link. After that, I did a literature review. I found one population based observational cohort study that included around 38,000 men with prostate cancer and diabetes from Ontario, Canada. Authors reported that metformin treatment was associated with decreased prostate cancer mortality: 24% reduction for each additional 6 months of metformin use while use of other anti-diabetic medications did not significantly decrease mortality. This was a very interesting study. Two prospective studies tested metformin in non-diabetic patients with prostate cancer. First enrolled 42 patients with castration resistant prostate cancer who were treated with metformin, 1,000 mg twice daily. Two patients had ≥ 50% PSA decline and in 23 patients (52.3%) had a prolongation of PSA doubling time. Another study enrolled 24 men with newly diagnosed prostate cancer that were treated 500 mg of metformin three times a day before the surgery (neoadjuvant treatment). Metformin reduced

Ki67 proliferation index by 29%, compared to the baseline biopsy, meaning that the cancer became less aggressive with metformin use of about four weeks. That was very interesting.

Nobody knows how metformin works, exactly. Some studies have shown metformin also could help patients with breast cancer and pancreatic cancer, and also observational studies have shown decreased risk of the incidence of cancer, suggesting that metformin can help prevent cancer.

Though we are still trying to understand how metformin works, we do know it’s inexpensive and it’s very safe. Instead of having a treatment of prostate cancer that costs more than $100,000, it would be great to have one that costs only a couple of dollars. We’re not there yet, but we’re hopeful that this trial and others like it will help us continue to learn more about how to best treat prostate cancer.

To learn more about when metformin may work, we came up with the study design to test metformin in combination with Casodex (bicalutamide), an FDA-approved agent for prostate cancer. We selected Casodex (bicalutamide) because testing of this combination using animal model showed the synergistic effect of Casodex (bicalutamide) and metformin. The side effects profile is much better than from Lupron (leuprolide), so we thought that would be a reasonable alternative for people who have biochemically recurrent prostate cancer with rapidly rising PSA.

What can patients expect to happen in the trial?

Dr. Bilusic: First, we have to make sure they’re eligible. When they contact us, we determine if they have a biochemical recurrence, which we define as somebody who’s had prostatectomy followed by two rising PSAs above 0.2. If PSA doubling time is between three and nine months, those patients are potentially eligible for this trial.

We are also looking for people who are not diabetic, but they should have a BMI of 25 or more because the mice models we tested were obese, and one of the side effects of metformin is weight loss. We did not want to give somebody who is skinny to start with a drug that makes them lose weight. Eligible participants should also not have their testosterone suppressed by hormonal therapy. We don’t allow prior hormonal therapy, unless it was given during the primary treatment as an adjuvant or neoadjuvant therapy.

Those are the main inclusion criteria: BMI more than 25, no history of diabetes (hemoglobin A1C should be less than 6.5), testosterone more than 150, no prior hormonal therapy, and PSA doubling time is three to nine months. Then we’ll do a CAT scan and bone scan to confirm they don’t have metastatic disease.

Once we determine they are eligible, we randomize them to one of the two groups. One group (control arm) will receive observation for two months, followed by Casodex (bicalutamide) alone for 6 more months. The other group will receive metformin alone for two months, followed by a combination of metformin and Casodex (bicalutamide) for 6 months. Because Casodex (bicalutamide) doesn’t deprive testosterone, people have normal levels of testosterone, or sometimes higher levels. The total duration of treatment is 8 months or 32 weeks.

They come here to the NIH clinical center once a month, where we do blood work, a doctor evaluation, and we provide medication. During the trial, in addition to regular blood work, we research blood at the start, at the beginning of cycle three, and at the end of the trial. We’re trying to understand the mechanism of how metformin works.

I know that you supply the medication, but are there any fees associated with participating in the trial?

Dr. Bilusic: No, there’s really nothing else for the patient. Everything is provided, and all the care here at the NIH Clinical Center is free. Once a patient is enrolled on one of our protocols, we also support their trip to the NIH Clinical Center, so patients can come from all over the United States. We also provide a stipend for a hotel if they have to stay overnight. And we give them a meal voucher.

Subscribe to learn more about Dr. Bilusic’s trial as well as others.

Which is better for your heart: Firmagon or Lupron?

Dr. Matthew Roe is a Professor of Medicine at Duke University’s Clinical Research Institute (DCRI), the Faculty Director of the Global Outcomes Commercial MegaTrials program, and the Director of their Fellowship Program. (The DCRI’s databank is the world’s oldest and largest cardiovascular database.) He has participated in the leadership and conduct of numerous clinical trials focused on therapies for acute coronary syndromes and chronic cardiovascular disease. He is keenly interested in clinical trials’ operational conduct as well as in national and global academic collaborations.

Prostatepedia spoke with him recently about a clinical trial he’s leading that looks at the cardiovascular safety of Firmagon (degarelix) versus Lupron (leuprolide) in men with prostate cancer.

Not a member? Join us!

What’s the thinking behind your clinical trial comparing cardiovascular safety of Firmagon (degarelix) versus Lupron (leuprolide) in patients?

Dr. Roe: Years ago, a number of studies were done that showed a potential signal for increased cardiovascular event risk among patients with known cardiovascular disease who were receiving androgen deprivation therapy, the standard of which is Lupron (leuprolide). Eventually, there was a document released by professional societies, including cardiology professional societies and urology professional societies and a black-box warning on the label of that drug, that there is the potential that patients with known cardiovascular disease who receive this therapy could have an increase in cardiovascular risk. That therapy is used to treat advanced prostate cancer and has known benefits there. These professional societies were trying to set up a shared decision-making model with prostate cancer patients and their physicians to better understand if this therapy should be used, and if so, how should they monitor it.

Then Firmagon (degarelix) was developed as a different type of androgen deprivation therapy with a different target, having similar efficacy in treating prostate cancer. Some post-hoc analyses suggested that patients who receive Firmagon (degarelix) might have a lower risk of cardiovascular events when they have known prior cardiovascular disease while receiving this drug as treatment for prostate cancer.

All these studies that were done were retrospective studies that weren’t meant to answer that question.

The trial we’re conducting, the PRONOUNCE Study, was designed as a prospective rigorous randomized trial to compare those two treatments among patients with prostate cancer, to understand if there is a lower cardiovascular risk with Firmagon (degarelix) versus Lupron (leuprolide).

What can a patient expect to happen during the trial?

Dr. Roe: A number of sites in the United States and other countries are participating. In those sites, urologists or oncologists who treat patients with prostate cancer are evaluating their patient population whom they’re considering treating with androgen deprivation therapy.

If they meet their eligibility criteria for the trial, they discuss the trial with them. If the patient is eligible and he chooses to participate, then he is randomly allocated to receive Firmagon (degarelix) or Lupron (leuprolide) for 12 months. The therapy is provided to him as a study participant. He will be seen every month during the study to do a check in and assess whether or not he has experienced a cardiovascular event and to optimize his background treatment therapy for both prostate cancer and cardiovascular disease.

I work at the Duke Clinical Research Institute. We’re the academic coordinating center, working with the sponsor Ferring Pharmaceuticals to help design, run, and conduct the study. This is a collaboration between academic experts and the sponsor. We have a steering committee of academic experts—cardiologists like myself, urologists, and prostate cancer oncologists to work together to conduct this study.

Are there any specific eligibility criteria that you’d like to call attention to?

Dr. Roe: Yes. We are looking for patients with prostate cancer who meet the criteria to receive androgen deprivation therapy. I’m not going to go into the exact details, but the trial is for those eligible for advanced prostate cancer treatment. These would be people who would not be receiving a prostatectomy or radiotherapy treatment. These patients have to have a known history of prior cardiovascular disease, which we confirm. We work with the study sites to implement that confirmation, because urologists and oncologists treating patients with prostate cancer aren’t really experts in cardiovascular disease.

We work with them to ensure that they’re meeting those criteria and that they’re treating patients appropriately. In many cases, a cardiologist will work with the site investigator, who is an urologist or an oncologist, to help conduct the study.

I’m sure there are quite a few men with advanced prostate cancer who also have cardiovascular disease.

Dr. Roe: Yes. It’s estimated that about 35-40 percent of men with advanced prostate cancer will have a known history of cardiovascular disease, partly because both conditions are common in older age. That is one of the strongest risk factors for both prostate cancer and heart disease, so we see the convergence of those two conditions.

If someone reading this is interested, who should he contact?

Dr. Roe: We do have at least 30 or so sites in the United States. If someone is interested, he can contact me directly and then I can put him in touch with the right people. One of the challenges is that only a certain number of physicians who treat patients with prostate cancer would be interested in participating and being investigators for the trial, so matching them with patients around the country is always a challenge. We are happy to help patients who are interested in participating have that opportunity, even if their local doctor may not be the one who’s the investigator.

Is there any fee for patients to participate?

Dr. Roe: No. They receive reimbursement for their travel to come to and from the clinic for their visits. They receive the therapy that they’re getting, Firmagon (degarelix) or Lupron (leuprolide), for free. There are no costs for the patient; they just have to volunteer their time. We recognize that and we share information with the patient.

At end of the day, we will share the information from the study directly with the study participants, to help them understand their contribution and what it means going forward. We overtly honor the volunteerism and altruism of the patients.

Is there anything else you’d like patients to know, either about this trial in particular or the context in which it occurs?

Dr. Roe: If a patient who has advanced prostate cancer and known cardiovascular disease is being considered for androgen deprivation therapy, it is important that he speak with his cardiologist. (Presumably, both a cardiologist or cardiovascular specialist and an urologist or oncologist would treat him.) He needs to ensure that all the providers have a discussion about what the best and safest treatment would be before therapy begins. Obviously, this trial is not completed yet so we don’t have any answers. In the meantime, it is certainly in the patient’s best interest to ensure that his providers are communicating and trying to jointly determine the right approach.

Not a member? Join us to read more about cardiovascular disease and prostate cancer?