Aspirin may reduce prostate cancer deaths

Taking an aspirin a day has many health benefits, and reducing prostate cancer may be one of them.  New research shows men who use aspirin or other blood thinners after treatment for prostate cancer have a substantially lower risk of dying or seeing the cancer spread to another organ.


Christopher Logothetis, M.D., a medical oncologist at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, said the study is in line with others that suggest aspirin's blood-thinning and anti-inflammatory properties reduce the risk of many kinds of cancer.


"Anti-inflammatory" is the key word here.  The Prostate Storm discusses at some length the connection between inflammation in the prostate with the occurrence of cancer.   The notion is that if you can reduce prostatic inflammation (prostatitis, by definition) through an anti-inflammatory diet, you can reduce prostate cancer as well.

PSA Rising? Say it Ain't So ...

Only days before publishing what I thought would be my first and last book on prostate cancer, The Prostate Storm, I got a call from my urologist’s office.  The nurse tells me the doctor wants to see me “immediately” about my latest PSA level.  

My alarm bells going off, I naturally ask what the number was.  I had just taken my tenth follow-up PSA test after high-dose radiation treatment 28 months earlier, but I didn’t know the result.  The nurse tells me 1.5 (ng/ml), which initially was a relief but I realized too it had risen from a nadir of 0.9 to 1.3 and now 1.5 in just six months. 

I wasn’t sure what a little bump up like that meant.  A year ago I had experienced a full point jump, the phantom “bounce” which happens to a lot of guys who have radiation therapy; it settled back to the nadir within three months.  

Like most guys with prostate cancer, I also had a history of BPH and prostatitis, which can influence PSA levels, so my initial reaction was not to worry.  A small rise could be attributable to lots of things, including sex. So I asked the nurse to have the urologist to please call me, but she explained the doctor didn’t make phone calls to patients “otherwise he’d be doing that all the time.” She insisted Dr. JM wanted to see me “as soon as possible” — which, she said, would have to be next Friday, a full week away.

Huh?  Doctor raises my anxiety level to Defcon 5, he won’t call me, and he won’t see me for seven days—what crappy patient care is that?  Is that how the “cancer may be returning” message is generally delivered?