Never go back...

Never go back.  Never go back.
Never return to the haunts of your youth.
Keep to the track, to the beaten track,
Memory holds all you need of the truth.

Never look back.  Never look back.
Never succumb to the gorgon’s stare.
Keep to the track, to the beaten track,
No-one is waiting and nothing is there.

Never go back.  Never go back.
Never surrender the future you’ve earned.
Keep to the track, to the beaten track,
Never return to the bridges you burned.

Never look back.  Never look back.
Never retreat to the ‘glorious past’.
Keep to the track, to the beaten track,
Treat every day of your life as your last.

Never go back.  Never go back.
Never acknowledge the ghost on the stair.
Keep to the track, to the beaten track,
No-one is waiting and nothing is there.

Felix Dennis

Reading this could save his life!

Delighted to have my article published in 'Expat Life Thailand', a Thai national women's magazine. As it's also on-line it should reach millions of people and help them to take early action if they suspect all might not be well...

Please contact me if you are worried or have any questions.

dansencier@yahoo.co.uk

Surgery or radiotherapy?

After diagnosis, I'll never forget having to make the choice of treatment. It's not a choice that's made for you, you have to make it after talking to various specialists, researching on-line and talking to anyone who'll listen. Luckily, my cancer only gave a choice of those two treatments, there was too much of it for proton beam or brachia-therapy.

I decided, rather than have a radiated ball of 'gunk' hanging inside me, that cutting it out and dumping it in the hospital incinerator sounded cleaner and more permanent. I could then travel 300 miles home and have real distance between me and the problem.

So read this article from 'Prostate Cancer News', it may help your decision...

(But always remember, it's always cheaper for the health service to go with Radiotherapy, so when the specialist is pushing you in that direction, it's usually with £££ in their eyes)

OK....

Surgery is more effective than radiation therapy at treating localized prostate cancer and more likely to prolong the life of patients undergoing the procedure, according to results of a new study by Canadian researchers. The study, titled “Surgery Versus Radiotherapy for Clinically-localized Prostate Cancer: A Systematic Review and Meta-analysis,” was published in the journal European Urology.

More than 90% of prostate cancer patients are diagnosed with localized cancer restricted to the prostate tissue. In such cases, the treatment is usually either surgery or radiotherapy, therapeutic choices that can vary among patients and clinicians. The main mode of detection is serum prostate-specific antigen testing.

In the present study, carried out at the Odette Cancer Centre, Sunnybrook Research Institute (University of Toronto), researchers performed a meta-analysis of 19 studies with low-to-moderate bias risk, involving up to 118,830 patients, to evaluate overall and prostate cancer-specific mortality among patients treated either with radiation (mostly external beam radiotherapy) or radical prostatectomy. This surgical procedure consists of the complete removal of the prostate. Robotic prostatectomy also, according to a press release on the study by prostate cancer surgeon Dr. David Samadi, allows for better staging and grading of the prostate tumor and is associated with a better quality of life post-treatment.

The studies came primarily from a search of Medline, EMBASE (a biomedical literature database), and the Cochrane Library through June 2015.

From the analyses, researchers found that, when looking at cancer-specific mortality, patients who were treated with radiotherapy were twice as likely to die as patients who underwent surgery. Analyses of studies evaluating overall mortality further indicated that patients treated with radiotherapy were about 1.5 times more likely to die earlier than those treated with surgery.

The results, the researchers say, show that surgery for the treatment of localized prostate cancer is more effective and offers a better long-term prognosis than radiation therapy.

“In the past, studies that have compared the success rates of surgery or radiation have been confusing because of their methods. We have evaluated all the good-quality data comparing surgery and radiotherapy, and the results are pretty conclusive; in general, surgery results in better mortality rates than radiotherapy,” said the study’s senior author, Dr. Robert Nam.

Radium 223 for targeting prostate cancer

I hope this is at least some good news to many of my friends out there who are constantly looking for ways to steer their destiny in another direction.

A radioactive drug, similar to that which killed Russian former spy Alexander Litvinenko has been approved as a treatment for prostate cancer on the NHS.

Radium-223 is a powerful drug based on a mildly radioactive form of the metal radium. Given as an infusion into the bloodstream, it is taken up by bones and can specifically target tumours through alpha particles.

Infusions are typically given once a month, for up to six months. The drugs emit the same type of radiation as polonium-210 which was used to assassinate former Russia spy Alexander Litvinenko, due to its ability to destroy tissues and organs. However, despite this, when used in a controlled manner, the same capabilities can be used to specifically target cancers.

The health regulation authority NICE has announced prostate cancer patients will now be able to access the drug on a routine basis. It has previously only been recommended for patients who had received initial treatment alongside an additional medicine, docetaxel. Professor Carole Longson, director of the centre for health technology evaluation at NICE, said: “I'm pleased we have been able to broaden our recommendations for radium-223. Patients with prostate cancer will surely benefit from this drug being available for routine NHS use. I hope we’ll see more drugs like this move into routine NHS use after companies have been able to better demonstrate cost-effectiveness.”