Facts vs Assumptions in Prostate Cancer
November 23, 2009
Natural News
By Sherry Baker
This may well be remembered as the year medical “facts” about prostate cancer were shown to be riddled with wrong assumptions and downright myths. As readers of NaturalNews know, for example, recent studies have shown little if any benefit to regular prostate cancer screening tests with hundreds of thousands of men being over-diagnosed and over-treated with a potentially deadly malignancy when they actually have no lethal disease. Now comes even more startling news about the wrong-headedness of standard prostate cancer care.
It is common for men with elevated prostate-specific antigen (PSA) levels to face biopsies. But scientists at Wake Forest University School of Medicine and the University of Wisconsin-Madison have discovered that elevated PSA measurements are not necessarily potential signs of prostate cancer at all. Instead, they can simply be caused by a hormone normally occurring in healthy bodies.
According to a study just published in Cancer Epidemiology, Biomarkers and Prevention, the researchers discovered that parathyroid hormone, which the body produces to regulate blood levels of calcium, can raise PSA levels in healthy men who do not have prostate cancer. Unfortunately, elevated PSA levels currently set off alarm bells in the mainline medical establishment, leading many men to be biopsied and then treated unnecessarily with surgery, chemo, radiation, and/or emasculating hormones.
“PSA picks up any prostate activity, not just cancer,” said lead investigator Gary G. Schwartz, Ph.D., M.P.H., an associate professor of cancer biology, epidemiology and prevention at the Wake Forest University School of Medicine, in a statement to the press. “Inflammation and other factors can elevate PSA levels. If the levels are elevated, the man is usually sent for a biopsy. The problem is that, as men age, they often develop microscopic cancers in the prostate that are clinically insignificant. If it weren’t for the biopsy, these clinically insignificant cancers, which would never develop into fatal prostate cancer, would never be seen.”
The research team investigated data from 1,273 men who participated in the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey from 2005 to 2006. At the time of the survey, none of the research subjects reported any current infection or inflammation of the prostate gland, prostate biopsy in the past month, or history of prostate cancer. The scientists adjusted their findings for age, race and obesity because PSA levels rise with age, are higher in African-American men, and lower in overweight males.
The results? The higher the level of parathyroid hormone measured in the blood, the higher the PSA levels. And when men had parathyroid levels that were normal, but at the high end of the normal scale, their PSA measurements were increased by 43% — a range that, when seen by most urologists, would be used to justify immediate biopsies. The bottom line, according to Dr. Schwartz: “It’s likely that there are a lot of men out there with elevated PSAs that may be due to elevated parathyroid hormone rather than prostate cancer.”
The findings are especially important for black men, the researchers stated, because about 20% of them have high parathyroid hormone levels compared to about 10% of Caucasians. And that results in African-American men being placed at a higher risk for unnecessary biopsies and over-treatment.
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Experts Pushing for Less Cancer Screenings
November 12, 2009
Natural News.com
By S. L. Baker
(NaturalNews) According to the American Cancer Society (ACS), breast cancer is the most common cancer in women, affecting over 200,000 women in the U.S. each year and killing more than 40,000. For American men, cancer of the prostate is the type of malignancy that strikes with the greatest frequency.
The ACS says an estimated 192,280 men will be diagnosed with the disease in 2009 and around 27,360 men will die from it. Based on the assumption that finding breast and prostate cancers in the earliest stages will make them easier to cure and slash mortality rates, for over twenty years the U.S. medical establishment has pushed for mass screenings for these common cancers.
So after two decades, all this testing must have resulted in a huge decline in deaths from these diseases, right?
Wrong.
In an opinion piece published in the October 21st issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), experts from the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) and the University of Texas (UT) Health Science Center explain that overall breast and prostate cancer rates are higher and far more men and women are being treated. However, the incidence of aggressive or late stage cancers has not been significantly reduced at all. Bottom line: the huge and highly hyped effort to screen the adult population for breast and prostate cancers has not brought about the anticipated decrease in deaths.
“Screening does provide some benefit, but the problem is that the benefit is not nearly as much as we hoped and comes at the cost of over diagnosis and over treatment,” said one of the paper’s authors, Laura Esserman, MD, MBA, in a statement to the media. Dr. Esserman is a professor of surgery and radiology, director of the UCSF Carol Franc Buck Breast Care Center, and co-leader of the breast oncology program at the UCSF Helen Diller Family Comprehensive Cancer Center.
“We need to focus on developing new tools to identify men and women at risk for the most aggressive cancers, to identify at the time of diagnosis those who have indolent or ‘idle’ tumors that are not life-threatening. If we can identify groups of patients that don’t need much treatment, or don’t need to be screened, wouldn’t that be great?” she stated. “Screening is by no means perfect. We should want to make it better. For both breast and prostate cancer we need to invest in changing our focus from the cancers that won’t kill people to the ones that do.”
The JAMA article points out that screening costs an enormous amount of money — more than $20 billion is spent annually in the U.S. to check people for prostate and breast cancer. And the sheer number of people convinced to have these tests has resulted in far more early cancers being detected than in the past. For example, because of regular prostate screening antigen (PSA) testing, now considered “necessary” for most middle-aged men, the number of American men diagnosed with prostate cancer has almost doubled since l980. The number of woman being diagnosed with breast cancer has nearly doubled over that time as well.
So why do the authors of the JAMA article write “the contribution from screening is uncertain”? Because while screening increases the detection of slow growing tumors, the JAMA authors point out, it too often misses the most aggressive cancers which grow so fast that they are not detected early enough to be cured in many cases. And the cancer experts also point out that many patients are undergoing treatment from cancers that actually pose minimal risk. That’s right: despite all the fear and scary statistics loudly publicized about these diseases, having breast or prostate cancer doesn’t necessarily mean you have a dangerous disease.
“Without the ability to distinguish cancers that pose minimal risk from those posing substantial risk and with highly sensitive screening tests, there is an increased risk that the population will be over-treated,” the authors of the JAMA article conclude.
“The basic assumption that screening programs that find and treat early stage disease will then prevent late-stage disease, or prevent cancer from spreading, may not always be correct. If a tumor is aggressive, finding it early may not prevent death,” one of the authors, Ian Thompson, MD, said in a statement to the media. Dr. Thompson is professor and chairman of the Department of Urology at the Cancer Therapy and Research Center at the UT Health Science Center at San Antonio and has authored about 400 scientific articles addressing prevention, early detection, and treatment for prostate, kidney, and bladder cancers.
The JAMA authors are not condemning all cancer screening but getting the word out that it is “most successful when pre-malignant lesions can be detected and eliminated” such as during colonoscopies. And they are calling for these specific recommendations for early detection and prevention:
• The development of tests that distinguish between cancers that are lethal and those that are low-risk.
• A reduction in treatment for low-risk disease. “Diagnosing cancers that don’t kill the patient has led to treatment that may do more harm than good,” they stated.
• Developing tools for doctors and patients to help them make informed decisions about prevention, screening, biopsy and treatment. This includes providing individualized treatments tailored to a person’s specific tumor.
• Working to identify those who are at the highest risk for cancer and using proven prevention interventions to keep them from developing a malignancy in the first place.
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Low Vitamin D May Be Root Cause of Cancer
June 15, 2009
NaturalNews.com
by S. L. Baker
(NaturalNews) What initially causes cancer to develop? The current scientific model assumes that a genetic mutation begins the genesis of a malignancy. But what if that assumption is wrong and there’s another key to the start of cancer? Scientists at the Moores Cancer Center at the University of California (UC) in San Diego have raised that possibility. And they’ve come up with another, brand new model of how cancer develops.
Reporting online in the current Annals of Epidemiology, they point to a host of research that suggests cancer develops when cells lose the ability to stick together in a healthy, normal way -- and the key factor to this initial triggering of a malignancy could well be a lack of vitamin D.
In the article, Cedric Garland, DrPH, professor of family and preventive medicine at the UC San Diego School of Medicine, and his research team explain that previous theories associating vitamin D with many cancers have been tested and confirmed in over 200 epidemiological studies. In addition, more than 2,500 laboratory studies have been conducted that provide an understanding of the physiological basis of vitamin D’s link to cancer.
According to Dr. Garland, researchers have documented that with enough vitamin D present, cells adhere to one another in tissue and act as normal, mature epithelial cells. But if there is a deficiency of vitamin D, cells can lose this stick-to-each other quality, as well as their identity as differentiated cells. The result? They may revert to a dangerous stem cell-like state and become cancerous.
In a statement to the media, Dr. Garland suggested that much of the process that starts cancer in the first place could be stopped at the outset by maintaining enough vitamin D in the body. “Vitamin D may halt the first stage of the cancer process by re-establishing intercellular junctions in malignancies having an intact vitamin D receptor,” he said. And, he added, that if diet and supplements restore appropriate levels of vitamin D, the development of cancer might be prevented. According to Dr. Garland, vitamin D levels can be easily increased, if needed, by modest supplementation with vitamin D3 in the range of 2000 IU/day.
The “cure” for cancer already exists…
This new model of cancer’s cause has been dubbed DINOMIT by Dr. Garland and his colleagues. Each letter stands for a different phase of cancer development: “D” refers to disjunction, or loss of communication between cells; “I” is for initiation, where genetic mutations begin to play a role; “N” refers to natural selection of the fastest-reproducing cancer cells; “O” is a for overgrowth of cells; “M” stands for metastasis, the spread of a malignancy to other tissues; “I” refers to involution and “T” for transition, both dormant states that may occur in cancer and can potentially be altered by increasing vitamin D.
“Competition and natural selection among disjoined cells within a tissue compartment, such as might occur in the breast’s terminal ductal lobular unit, for example, are the engine of cancer,” Dr.Garland said in the press statement. “The DINOMIT model provides new avenues for preventing and improving the success of cancer treatment.”
In their Annals of Epidemiology report, the UC scientists point to a host of studies that show an apparent beneficial effect of vitamin D (and, to some extent, calcium) on cancer risk and survival of patients with breast, colorectal and prostate cancer. In fact, Dr. Garland and his team have published epidemiological studies about the potential preventive effects of vitamin D for some twenty years.
In 2008, Dr. Garland and his colleagues found an association between a lack of sunlight exposure, low vitamin D and breast cancer. In earlier work, they showed linkages between increased levels of vitamin D3 or markers of vitamin D and a lower risk for breast, colon, ovarian and kidney cancers, too.
As reported earlier in Natural News, clues about a possible cause-and-effect association between a lack of vitamin D and cancer’s development have rapidly accumulated over the past few years. For example, researchers have found that women who are deficient in vitamin D at the time they are diagnosed with breast cancer are nearly 75 percent more likely to die from the disease than women with sufficient vitamin D levels. Moreover, their cancer is twice as likely to metastasize to other parts of the body.
Healthy levels of vitamin D have been found to slash the risk of numerous cancers by 77 percent.
Click here to get more information on this NaturalNews.com article.
