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New surgical procedure for prostate cancer uses natural orifices

Removing the prostate is a common treatment for patients with prostate cancer.Recently, urologists at Mayo Clinic in Arizona, suggest that the latest advances in the surgical treatment of the disease involve using the body’s own natural orifices as access points instead of making incisions through the skin. These types of procedures, Natural Orifice Transluminal Endoscopic Surgery, or NOTES, have advanced over the past several years and now, it is believed for the first time, a NOTES procedure has been perfected to remove the prostate.

New GPS-like system to track prostate cancer tumors

The Cedars-Sinai’s Samuel Oschin Comprehensive Cancer Institute is now being offering to patients undergoing radiation therapy a new system that utilizes a precise a GPS-like system to track prostate cancer tumors.
The monitoring system, called Calypso, allows radiation beams to more precisely target the cancer as it gives real-time positioning information that allows the radiation beams to focus directly on the cancer.

Men with long ring finger ‘three times more likely to get prostate cancer’

Doctors at the Gachon University Gil Hospital, in Incheon, South Korea concluded Men with a long ring finger could be three times more likely to develop prostate cancer, reports the Daily Mail.

They found that the risk increases if the ring finger on the right hand is significantly longer than the index finger next to the thumb. But men whose ring fingers are only slightly longer, or are about the same length, are much less likely to get the disease.

The findings open up the possibility of screening men with longer fingers at an early age for signs of cancer.

New report shows most men with low PSA undergo aggressive therapy

According to a report in the July 26 issue of Archives of Internal Medicine, one of the JAMA/Archives journals, most men who are diagnosed with prostate cancer appear to under undergo aggressive therapy, even if they have a low prostate-specific antigen (PSA) level and low-risk disease.

Researchers at the Cancer Institute of New Jersey, New Brunswick, concluded results underscore the fact that PSA level, the current biomarker, is not a sufficient basis for treatment decisions. They suggest that without the ability to distinguish indolent from aggressive cancers, lowering the biopsy threshold might increase the risk of overdiagnosis and overtreatment.

Diagnosis of prostate cancer by detection of minichromosome maintenance 5 protein in urine sediments

Previous studies suggested the accuracy of prostate-specific antigen (PSA) testing in prostate cancer detection is constrained by low sensitivity and specificity. Dysregulated expression of minichromosome maintenance (Mcm) 2–7 proteins is an early event in epithelial multistep carcinogenesis and thus MCM proteins represent powerful cancer diagnostic markers.
A recent study aimed to investigate Mcm5 as a urinary biomarker for prostate cancer detection.
Rersearchers concluded urinary Mcm5 detection seems to be a simple, accurate and noninvasive method for identifying patients with prostate cancer. Large-scale prospective trials are now required to evaluate this test in diagnosis and screening.

Dog’s sense of smell could help diagnose a man’s prostate cancer

A new study demonstrated that dogs can be trained to identify and diagnose prostate cancer.

The study leader explained that the trained dogs, out of a study in France, sniffed the urine of men with prostate cancer and were nearly perfect in letting doctors know which ones were positive for prostate cancer and which ones were not.

Baseline PSA as a predictor of prostate cancer-specific mortality

A new study at Duke University Medical Center, Durham, North Carolina, investigated the possibility of identification of the risk of death from prostate cancer and death from all causes using information available at the time of baseline prostate-specific antigen (PSA) measurement.

Researchers concluded Baseline PSA measurement appears to be particularly pertinent and a reliable and independent predictor of death from prostate cancer. A baseline PSA of 4 ng/mL has been associated with higher risk of death from prostate cancer.

Implications of detection and characteristics of primary circulating prostate cells for surgical treatment of prostate cancer

A recent study at Hospital de Carabineros de Chile, Chile, had two objectives:

1. To determine the frequency of primary circulating prostate cells (CPCs) in men with prostate cancer at the time of diagnosis, the association with micrometastasis, sub-classification for CD82 and the relation with pathological stage.

2. To determine their clinical usefulness to identify patients in whom radical prostatectomy would be first choice therapy.

The study finds that the detection of CPCs and sub-classification with CD82 could be clinically useful to identify men with a significantly lower risk of micrometastais and as a consequence to identify men in whom radical prostatectomy could be the best initial treatment.

Blocking androgen response could be key for halting tumor progression in prostate cancer

Researchers at UT Southwestern Medical Center have found that blocking one of the enzymatic steps that allow the tumor to produce androgens could be the key in halting a tumor’s growth.

Previous studies showed that prostate cancer advances when tumors become resistant to hormone therapy, which is the standard treatment for patients, and begin producing their own androgens. Researchers suggest that this new step might one day provide a new avenue of therapy for patients with end-stage prostate cancer.

The findings will appear online in the August issue of Endocrinology.

How many early detected prostate cancers are needed to prevent one death?

A study at Hospital Clinico Universitario Zaragoza, Spain, aimed to determine the clinical significance of diagnosis and treatment of prostate cancer diagnosed in asymptomatic patients, in terms of survival and to face its disadvantages.

The study conclusions highlight the limited evidence for the data in terms of survival. Study warns about the difference in results between the centers of excellence and the rest, and creates doubts about the definition of cancer when it cannot be demonstrated beyond the biopsy. The usefulness of finding and treating early prostate cancers is questionable in terms of cost-benefit, recommending the transfer of this information to patients, before deciding on one or another option.

However, researchers stress the need for long- term prospective investigations to clarify which cases need to be treated and to prevent overdiagnosis. Future studies should consider whether it is worth looking further histological findings, in increasingly younger males and with lower PSA limits.