Why You Should Consider a Prostate Cancer Clinical Trial

/in , , , , , , , , , , , , /by

Why You Should Consider a Prostate Cancer Clinical Trial from Patient Empowerment Network on Vimeo. 

Dr. Alicia Morgans, a hematology and oncology specialist, explains the importance of prostate cancer patients of different geographic locations participating in clinical trials and the role trials plays in clinical care.

Dr. Alicia Morgans is an Assistant Professor of Medicine at the Robert H. Lurie Comprehensive Cancer Center of Northwestern University.

See more from The Pro-Active Prostate Cancer Patient Toolkit

Related Resources

 

Are You Prepared for Your Prostate Cancer Appointment? Expert Tips

Why You Should Speak Up About Your Prostate Cancer Care

Prostate Cancer Treatment Decisions: Which Path is Best for YOU?

 

Transcript:

Dr. Alicia Morgans:

From my perspective, I think any time in a prostate cancer journey is a great time to think about a clinical trial if that trial is available where you live or is available at a place where you would be willing to travel. We have so much to learn about prostate cancer, about how to continue to provide options to patients, and about how to support men as they go through their treatment. And the only way we can learn those things is if men participate in clinical trials. So importantly, also, we need to have men of diverse backgrounds of diverse races from geographic diversity.

Because if we only study certain people from the city of Chicago, for example, where I live, we’ll really only know what we know about those men. And we won’t necessarily know if we can apply our findings to men who live in Atlanta and are Black. It’s going to be the kind of thing where we have the data, but we don’t necessarily know if it’s going to be the right data for you.

So, the more men of color, the more men from different geographic locations that we can encourage to participate in clinical trials, the more we learn for every patient and the more we are able to take care of the specific and unique needs of you as an individual, which is really a critical part of what we do and why we do what we do. So, participating in clinical trials, no matter who you are, if you’re able, and if you’re willing, is really a great service to you to get, hopefully, better outcomes for you, but also a great service to your community of men with prostate cancer.  

Prostate Cancer Treatment Decisions: Which Path is Best for YOU?

/in , , , , , , , , , , , , /by

Prostate Cancer Treatment Decisions: Which Path is Best for YOU? from Patient Empowerment Network on Vimeo.

Which prostate cancer treatment path is best for you? Dr. Alicia Morgans discusses how multiple factors, including disease progression and patient goals, determine which treatment path is best to help improve a patient’s outcome and overall quality of life. 

Dr. Alicia Morgans is an Assistant Professor of Medicine at the Robert H. Lurie Comprehensive Cancer Center of Northwestern University.

See more from The Pro-Active Prostate Cancer Patient Toolkit

Related Resources

 

What Do Prostate Cancer Patients Need to Know About COVID-19?

Why You Should Speak Up About Your Prostate Cancer Care

How Does Prostate Cancer Staging Affect Treatment Approaches?

 

Transcript:

Dr. Alicia Morgans:

The main factors I think about when approaching a treatment plan for a patient is to understand is this treatment for cure. Are we able to cure this patient? Is that our goal? Or are we in a situation where we know that the cancer is going to be incurable, but we can prolong that individual’s life and improve the quality of life that he has?

That is a major breakdown or separation point in how we approach treatment. Once we figure that out, we can try to sort through among all the choices. If we’re going to use curative treatment to the prostate itself, what do we think is best for you as an individual man? And what do we think is possible from a medical perspective? Whether that’s radiation or surgery or even just watching and waiting with an active surveillance plan, there may be choices.

And similarly, with metastatic prostate cancer or advanced prostate cancer that’s incurable or not able to be cured, what are the medical treatments that we can use? And what are the choices that you as a man with prostate cancer want to make to really maximize your benefit – thinking through what’s important to you? What barriers do you have? And how do you want to go through your treatment sequence?

We’re actually really fortunate in prostate cancer care to have many choices, whether it’s in treating localized curable prostate cancer or in treating metastatic prostate cancer that we’re really trying to treat to prolong life and improve quality of life. In each setting, in most cases, there are multiple choices to make along the journey. Sometimes these choices would exclude other choices in the future, but sometimes they don’t. Sometimes you can choose A or B, because in a few months, you’re going to have the opposite option available to you. So, exactly what your choices are going to be are going to be important for you to speak with your doctor about.

But having those choices really empowers men to get engaged in each of these treatment decisions to explain this is my preference for that side effect or this particular toxicity, and I’m going to choose this treatment, because it works best for me because I can get to work or because it doesn’t lead to incontinence or because it doesn’t cause me to lose my hair or whatever the reason is. Men’s preferences can be so importantly incorporated into the treatment decision, because we have all the choices we have in treating prostate cancer.

How Does Prostate Cancer Staging Affect Treatment Approaches?

/in , , , , , , , , , , , , /by

How Does Prostate Cancer Staging Affect Treatment Approaches? from Patient Empowerment Network on Vimeo. 

Every stage of prostate cancer stage requires different treatment approaches. Dr. Alicia Morgans explains prostate cancer staging and how it impacts treat options.

Dr. Alicia Morgans is an Assistant Professor of Medicine at the Robert H. Lurie Comprehensive Cancer Center of Northwestern University.

See more from The Pro-Active Prostate Cancer Patient Toolkit

Related Resources

 

What Do Prostate Cancer Patients Need to Know About COVID-19?

Why You Should Speak Up About Your Prostate Cancer Care

Prostate Cancer Treatment Decisions: Which Path is Best for YOU?

 

Transcript:

Dr. Alicia Morgans:

Staging in prostate cancer is a way for people to understand how to best approach the treatment of the disease. To say this a different way, low stages – things like Stage I, II, and usually Stage III – can be treated with local therapies to the prostate itself with a goal of trying to cure the prostate cancer. And some patients who have Stage I disease may not even need active treatment, but could be followed on active surveillance as a way to monitor the cancer and prevent side-effects by simply monitoring until it would actually need treatment. Higher stage, like Stage IV, means that the cancer has spread outside of the prostate.

And it’s still prostate cancer. It just is cancer cells from the prostate that now live in the bones, or live in distant lymph nodes, or live in another organ or place in the body. Those cancer cells are still treated the exact same way we treat prostate cancer in terms of the medical therapies – the injections, the pills, the chemo agents potentially – that we would use to treat those cancer cells, whether they’re in the bones or in the prostate. But when they have spread outside of prostate, that typically means that there’s no longer an opportunity for us to cure that cancer. And we wouldn’t necessarily use things like surgery or radiation to the prostate if the cancer had spread.

I say “wouldn’t necessarily,” because that is certainly an area that’s evolving. And now even men with metastatic prostate cancer or Stage IV prostate cancer can be treated with radiation, in particular, to the prostate, and we know that can be beneficial. So, staging helps us understand how far the cancer has spread or not spread.

And it helps us understand if we can treat that patient with local treatments to the prostate to try to cure them, or if we need to use medical therapies as a major backbone of treatment rather than things like radiation or surgery to treat them for prolonging their life and improving quality of life but knowing that we can’t cure their disease.