Biden's prostate cancer described as 'aggressive' — what to know about the disease's prognosis
Prostate cancer cases have been on the rise in recent years, increasing 3% annually since 2014 – and now former President Joe Biden is one of the more than 300,000 men to be diagnosed this year.
Biden's office released the announcement on Sunday, days after news that a "small nodule" had been found in the former president's prostate during a routine exam.
"While this represents a more aggressive form of the disease, the cancer appears to be hormone-sensitive, which allows for effective management," his office said. "The president and his family are reviewing treatment options with his physicians."
Treatment is usually more effective when prostate cancer is hormone-sensitive, as that means the disease will likely respond better to hormone therapy, according to Mayo Clinic.
Hormone therapy is used to block the effects of the hormones that fuel the growth of prostate cancer cells.
"Prostate cancer cells rely on testosterone to help them grow. Cutting off the supply of testosterone may cause cancer cells to die or to grow more slowly," the above source stated.
In addition to hormone therapy, common treatment options for prostate cancer include chemotherapy, targeted therapy, immunotherapy and radiopharmaceutical treatments.
Prostate cancer is a disease found in men that develops in the prostate gland.
About 313,780 new cases of prostate cancer will be diagnosed in 2025, and 35,770 men will die from the disease, according to the American Cancer Society.
Hormone therapy is used to block the effects of the hormones that fuel the growth of prostate cancer cells.
One in eight men will be diagnosed with prostate cancer in their lifetime, the same source stated.
Older men are at a higher risk of the disease, with six in 10 cases diagnosed in patients 65 and older. The average age at diagnosis is 67, with men under 40 rarely affected. Biden is 82.
Prostate cancer is the second-most common cancer in men, behind only skin cancer, the ACS noted.
Among men who undergo routine prostate cancer screening, the disease is usually caught early before symptoms emerge, per the ACS.
Typical early symptoms include problems urinating, a weak or slow urinary stream or an increased need to urinate.
Some men may also notice blood in the urine or bodily fluids.
More advanced symptoms may occur after the disease has spread. Those may include pain in the hips, back (spine), chest (ribs) or other areas, the ACS stated.
Men may also suffer from erectile dysfunction, weight loss, extreme fatigue, weakness in the legs or feet, or loss of bladder or bowel control.
The U.S. Preventive Services Task Force states that men aged 55 to 69 years should have the option to undergo periodic prostate-specific antigen (PSA)-based screening to monitor for prostate cancer.
"Before deciding whether to be screened, men should have an opportunity to discuss the potential benefits and harms of screening with their clinician and to incorporate their values and preferences in the decision," the USPSTF states.
While screening offers a "small potential benefit" of reducing the chances of dying from the disease, the agency noted that some men may experience negative effects, including false-positive results, overdiagnosis and overtreatment, and treatment complications.
Alternative prostate cancer screening methods are currently being researched, including one that uses a non-invasive urine test, as Fox News Digital recently reported.
For localized prostate cancers, where the disease is contained within the prostate, the five-year survival rate is at least 99%, according to the ACS.
For regional cases, where the disease has spread only to "nearby structures or lymph nodes," the five-year survival rate is also 99% or greater.
For more Health articles, visit www.foxnews.com/health
If the cancer has spread to other areas of the body, the five-year survival rate drops to 37%.
Actual survival rates may vary based on the patient's age, overall health, how the cancer has progressed post-diagnosis, the disease's response to treatment, and other factors, the ACS noted.
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Gizmodo
39 minutes ago
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RFK Jr. Is Opening the Alternative Medicine Floodgates
Snake oil salesmen will be eating good during the Trump presidency. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. recently declared that he will greatly expand people's access to experimental and alternative medical treatments, even while acknowledging that a 'lot of charlatans' are likely to take advantage of suffering people as a result. RFK Jr. made the announcement during a recent interview on the Ultimate Human Podcast hosted by Gary Brecka, a self-proclaimed biologist, biohacker, and longevity expert (Brecka appears to possess two bachelors' degrees in biology, but is not a licensed medical doctor). Kennedy stated that, under his reign as Secretary of Health and Human Services, Americans will more easily be able to get their hands on treatments not currently approved by health regulators. 'If you want to take an experimental drug—you can do that, you ought to be able to do that,' Kennedy told Brecka. While many patient advocates in general have pushed for looser regulations surrounding experimental or off-label treatments, other experts have cautioned that it's important to strike a balance between improved access and safety. And it's unlikely Kennedy's approach will meet that threshold. For starters, Kennedy has long spread misinformation about vaccines (one of the most effective medical interventions ever created), nutrition, and other health topics. And he's no stranger to backing alternative treatments that have next to no evidence supporting their use. During this latest interview, for instance, he referenced chelation and stem cells as unproven therapies that people should have easier access to. Stem cell medicine is a legitimate and growing field of research. But direct-to-consumer stem cell clinics often exaggerate their benefits, claiming stem cells can treat everything from cancer to long covid. In recent years, this cottage industry has exploded in the U.S. and overseas, and some patients have been severely injured from buying into the hype. People have experienced pulmonary embolisms, bacterial infections, and other serious complications, including blindness, from visiting these clinics. The risk-balance equation is arguably even worse with chelation therapy. Chelation involves using drugs that bind to heavy metals in the body, allowing them to be excreted out through urine. It's an effective treatment for certain kinds of acute poisoning or toxic exposures. But in alternative medicine circles, chelation is regularly used to 'cleanse' people of supposed toxins dubiously blamed for a bevy of chronic illnesses, including autism. As with stem cells, people have gotten hurt or died after taking chelation for unapproved uses. RFK seems to be fully aware of the potential danger that would come with making these treatments easier to access, yet brushed that off as inevitable during his interview. 'And of course you're going to get a lot of charlatans, and you're going to get people who have bad results,' he said. 'And ultimately, you can't prevent that either way. Leaving the whole thing in the hands of pharma is not working for us.' The Food and Drug Administration has previously warned the public to stay away from chelation therapy for autism and from unregulated stem cell treatments, but who knows if these warnings will stay up for much longer. Kennedy and the Trump Administration have repeatedly undermined approved medical treatments like vaccines. Now he's set to open the floodgates for unlicensed drugs that may not work or will harm people desperate enough to use them.
CNN
an hour ago
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Despite Kennedy's claims, vaccines have been tested in placebo-controlled studies – nearly 260 of them
Vaccines New in medicine Children's health Federal agenciesFacebookTweetLink Follow US Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has repeatedly claimed in public statements that most vaccines recommended for children in the US have not been tested against placebos, and particularly inert placebos such as saline solution or water. 'The only vaccine that has been tested in a full-blown placebo trial against an inert placebo was the Covid vaccine,' Kennedy said May 14 in testimony before the US Senate's Health, Labor, Education and Pensions Committee. 'The other 76 shots that children in this country received between birth and 18 years old, none of them have been safety tested in prelicensing studies against the placebo, which means we don't understand the risk profile for those products, and that's something I intend to remedy,' he told Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Connecticut. In 2023, Kennedy told Fox News host Jesse Watters: 'Vaccines are exempt from prelicensing placebo-controlled trials, so that there's no way that anybody can tell the risk profile of those products or even the relative benefits of those products before they're mandated. And we should have that kind of testing.' HHS is acting on Kennedy's claims, too. The department recently announced it will require all new vaccines be tested in placebo-controlled trials before they're licensed for use, a change it called 'a radical departure from past practices.' These claims made Dr. Jake Scott's ears perk up. Scott, an infectious disease specialist at Stanford University, knew that the assertions couldn't be true, and now he says he has the proof. Scott launched a project in April to round up every randomized, placebo-controlled clinical trial of vaccines in the medical literature, including studies run in other countries, since some vaccines used in the US are tested overseas. It took five weeks to arrive at a number: There have been 258 placebo-controlled clinical trials of vaccines, according to Scott and a team of volunteers who scoured databases of medical literature. More than half of those studies tested vaccines against inert placebos. Based on Scott's research, at least nine of the 16 vaccines that are routinely recommended by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for children have been tested against inert placebos, while several more have been tested against active placebos. In scientific research, randomized, placebo-controlled clinical trials are considered to generate the highest-quality evidence. That's because they split their study participants into equal groups; some get the study intervention or treatment, while others get a placebo or dummy remedy. Placebos are often carefully designed to look, taste or even smell like the intervention that's being tested. 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Together, they scoured PubMed, the database of medical research maintained by the National Library of Medicine, as well as reference lists from Cochrane, the World Health Organization and the CDC. Dr. Isaac Bogoch, an infectious disease specialist at the University of Toronto, said he was blown away when he saw the final list of studies, which included about 2.5 million participants in total. 'The body of evidence for many of the vaccines that we use is very impressive, and the data is robust,' said Bogoch, who didn't contribute to the project. 'This type of work is extremely important in era of unprecedented vaccine hesitancy.' Scott said the research proves that Kennedy's statements are 'demonstrably false.' To understand why, it's useful to break down the parts of Kennedy's argument, which he has repeated in different iterations for years. Kennedy has shifted the goalposts, but there are a few things he has said would make a clinical trial meet his requirements: First, an inert placebo, meaning a placebo control that didn't have any biological effects on the body, like water or saline solution. Kennedy has said that without comparison to an inert placebo, the true side effects of vaccines can't be fully understood. He also uses the term 'prelicensing,' meaning the research is conducted before the US Food and Drug Administration has approved the vaccines. The FDA sometimes accepts enough evidence to approve a vaccine but then will require more safety studies and monitoring after approval. Kennedy and other critics argue that more safety testing should be done before the vaccines are approved in the first place. In some instances, Kennedy has also said that these studies should be large, including many participants, and long-running. In general, larger studies have greater statistical power to show subtle differences between groups. And the longer a trial follows its participants, the more confident researchers can be in the durability of their results. Although scientists agree that larger and longer clinical trials are the most reliable, these studies are expensive to conduct. They can take years to run, which delays the possibility of getting an effective intervention to people. It can also be difficult to find participants who can stick with the monitoring requirements of a study for longer periods of time. In recent testimony, however, even Kennedy seemed to be softening his stance on this particular stipulation, agreeing that other types of studies can provide solid evidence, too. 'You know that the Cochrane Collaboration in 2016 published a study that showed that the predictive capacity of placebo-controlled trials, which are the gold standard, is actually not any better than good observational trials in retrospective trials. So we can do those kind of studies without subjecting people to an unethical experiment,' Kennedy said during a May 20 Senate budget hearing when asked about the need to test established vaccines in large, lengthy placebo-controlled trials. In his 2021 book, 'The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health,' Kennedy repeats the claim that vaccines for children haven't been tested against inert placebos, saying that he and groups he's affiliated with have explicitly asked to be shown such studies. He cites two letters between the Informed Consent Action Network or ICAN, a group run by his close associate Del Bigtree, and HHS. The letter from ICAN asserts that in contrast to most other FDA-approved medications, 'vaccines are not required to undergo long-term double-blind inert-placebo controlled trials to assess safety. In fact, not a single one of the clinical trials for vaccines given to babies and toddlers had a control group receiving an inert placebo.' The HHS letter refutes this claim: 'Contrary to statements made on page two of your letter, many pediatric vaccines have been investigated in clinical trials that included a placebo.' The letter goes on to say inert placebos are not necessary to understand the safety of a new vaccine, and so they haven't been required. Still, Scott says the evidence is clear: Of the 258 placebo-controlled vaccine studies he and his colleagues found, about half – 128 – included inert placebos. When it comes to vaccines routinely recommended for children, specifically, Scott found that at least nine of the 16 on the CDC's regular schedule have been tested against inert placebos: These are the vaccines against Covid-19; rotavirus; polio; influenza; measles, mumps and rubella; human papillomavirus; varicella, or chickenpox; pneumococcal; and H-flu, or Haemophilus influenzae. One of the largest of these trials was on the polio vaccine. The placebo-controlled part of the study included more than 400,000 grade-schoolers. Half got the inactivated polio vaccine created by Dr. Jonas Salk, and the other half were given injections of an inert placebo, which was saline solution. The trial was conducted in 1954, and the results were announced in April 1955. So great was the urgency to get the vaccine to kids that the FDA licensed it the same day. 'It's frankly astounding that someone who made such easily disprovable claims is now heading HHS and continues to promote similar misinformation,' Scott said of Kennedy in an email to CNN. 'We compiled this evidence specifically to counter these false narratives with hard data.' Scott says he and his colleagues hope to have their project published in peer-reviewed medical journal soon. For now, it's available in a publicly posted spreadsheet. Vaccine trials that don't use inert placebos will sometimes use what are known as active placebos. These comparison shots have some biological effect but don't interfere with scientists' ability to interpret the results of their study. Active placebos are used for a variety of reasons. In some parts of the world, for example, where it might be difficult to recruit participants, researchers might give the control group an unrelated vaccine to make sure they're getting some benefit by enrolling in the study. One study published last year in the Lancet, testing a vaccine against malaria, gave participants in the control group a vaccine against rabies instead. Rabies vaccines don't protect against malaria, so they wouldn't interfere with researchers' ability to tell whether the malaria shot actually worked. Other active placebos in the studies in Scott's project included shots that contained only an adjuvant, an ingredient that's added to vaccines to trigger a stronger immune response. Dr. Greg Poland, who studies how adults and children respond to vaccines at the Mayo Clinic, said it would be a mistake to assume that active placebos can't be valid and rigorous ways to test vaccines. Adjuvants, such as aluminum, are often the reason people get soreness around an injection site. Giving just the adjuvant can guard against even psychological bias in control participants who might guess that they didn't get a real vaccine if they didn't feel anything after their shots. It also allows researchers to isolate the benefits and side effects of the vaccine proteins, since everyone got the adjuvant. 'You're literally saying, 'OK, we're testing a vaccine that has ingredient A plus B against a non-vaccine placebo that has ingredient B.' So the only thing different between the two of them is the actual vaccine,' Poland said. An active comparator might also be used rather than an inert placebo because of ethics. When there's already a vaccine that's considered to be safe and effective against an infection, it's considered unethical to deny study participants the chance to get it. In that case, companies that want to test a new and improved version of a vaccine against an older one would normally have to offer participants in their control group the older vaccine. Many modern vaccines have been compared against older versions of the same vaccine. Flu vaccines are a good example, Poland says. If you were testing an improved type of flu vaccine, chances are that the board that oversees your clinical trial wouldn't approve a study that used an inert placebo – especially if you were testing it in a vulnerable group, like people over 65, for whom an infection is more likely to be dangerous. 'It's unethical because the recommendation is that everyone, each flu season, receive an influenza vaccine. So it'd be unethical to enroll people in a study where they may just get placebo and not get any benefit of protection,' Poland said. Poland said he's been puzzled by Kennedy's statements, too. He's concerned that they are getting traction with the public now that Kennedy is the head of the nation's health agencies. 'This notion that there are no placebo-controlled vaccine trials is patently false, but it's a really interesting phenomenon that I have a hard time understanding,' he said.
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Jonathan Gluck Was Told His Cancer Was a Death Sentence. 22 Years Later, He Shares How Science Saved Him (Exclusive)
In 2003, writer and editor Jonathan Gluck was diagnosed with an incurable blood cancer He was 38 — and a new dad — and told he had less than three years to live Advancements in cancer treatments have kept him alive for more than two decades, he writes in his new memoir, An Exercise in Uncertainty: A Memoir of Illness and Hope In April, when Jonathan Gluck turned 60, friends urged him to mark the milestone with a blowout event. After all, 'no one was sure I'd reach 60,' he says. But the writer and former managing editor of Vogue magazine wasn't interested: 'I was like, 'I don't want to tempt the fates.' ' After being diagnosed with multiple myeloma, an incurable blood cancer that develops in the bone marrow and damages bones and the immune system, at the age of 38, Gluck knows he's already outlived his predicted expiry date by 20 years. But the truth is, he did want to celebrate, in his own quiet way. So, he, his wife, Didi, and their 17-year-old son flew from their New York City home to Ohio to visit their daughter at college — and they had a birthday dinner in the school cafeteria. On the menu: a 'throwback to the '70s' salad bar and chocolate chip pretzel cookies. 'I couldn't have been happier,' he says. 'It was about being together, the four of us.' Finding joy in the day-to-day has been one of the 'strange gifts' of Gluck's life with cancer. 'It comes naturally,' says the writer, whose new memoir An Exercise in Uncertainty: A Memoir of Illness and Hope chronicles how he learned to accept living with an incurable disease and examines the remarkable developments in cancer treatment that have kept him alive. 'When you receive a serious diagnosis, you're forced to think about death a lot more than most people, which is awful in a lot of ways,' he says. 'But there's a sense of urgency to everything for me that I think is useful to anyone. It inspired me to make the most of my time, whether that's with my kids, my career, my friends, or my marriage." In 2003, Gluck was a rising star in the New York publishing world, and he felt like he had it all. A veteran of Men's Health, He'd just been hired as deputy editor of New York magazine—and better still, he and his wife, fellow journalist Didi Gluck, had welcomed their first child, a daughter named Abigail Juliana. When A.J., as they called her, was seven months old, Gluck went to a doctor about a stabbing pain in his hip that had been bothering him for a year after falling on a patch of ice. Worst case, he figured, he'd need hip surgery. But his MRI results delivered a more shocking blow: cancer. After a battery of tests, he learned he was facing multiple myeloma, a blood cancer with recurring tumors that eat away at bone marrow, and which at the time carried a life expectancy of less than three years. Gluck was told he might not survive more than 18 months. 'The minute I heard the news, it was like, game over,' Gluck recalls. He started radiation, had his stem cells harvested — and was elated when he went into remission. But then he began a now-familiar wait for the next sign of trouble. 'Living with an incurable disease is like sleeping next to a hibernating bear,' Gluck writes. 'For the moment, I felt safe, but I knew it was only a matter of time before the bear woke up.' Distraction became a refuge: He threw himself into work, and over the years has discovered Zen-like healing in fly-fishing. 'Your mind tends to not go to all the scary, dark places,' says Gluck of the meditative rhythm of casting a line, which he's been known to practice on his NYC neighborhood street. With an infant at home, he also poured himself into parenting. 'My single greatest fear was, 'Am I going to miss out on being a dad?'' he says. 'Time with A.J. helped not only keep my mind off of bad things, but put my mind on good things.' Just before Gluck hit his three-year mark in remission, he and Didi decided to try for a second child. "My wife has been extremely optimistic throughout this whole process and that was one of the most optimistic moments in her," Gluck says, "She helped lead us through, because she didn't hesitate for a split second. She was like, 'It's going to be okay one way or the other. We're having a second kid.' " But in 2007, four months before their son Oscar was born, Gluck cracked a rib while turning around in his chair at work. Another tumor. Another cycle of radiation, just as he and Didi, now 54, were preparing for their son. Two years later, scans revealed more lesions. From that point forward, it was as if his doctors were playing 'whack-a-mole,' Gluck writes. The relentless strain of illness, caregiving, and the looming possibility of death, took a toll on Gluck's marriage, which by 2013 was nearing a breaking point, culminating in a screaming match on the streets of the East Village. ('We were the couple other people tried not to stare at,' he writes with painful honesty of the fight.) 'It was like we were preparing ourselves for when I was gone,' says Gluck. 'It's difficult to love somebody when you're afraid they might disappear tomorrow. And it's difficult to love somebody when you have tremendous guilt that you're not going to be here for her or our kids.' Therapy helped them find their way back: 'We started to rebuild. We forgave each other.' And they accepted the reality of their dynamic. As Didi once said to him, 'No marriage doesn't have a 'thing'... Cancer is our thing.' Gluck knows there's an odd 'right time/right place' aspect to his cancer. New targeted therapies were developed just as his disease progressed. Some have come with harsh side effects — notably, he writes, uncontrollable diarrhea that caused him to lose 25 pounds and at times saw him dashing from Vogue meetings to the restroom. Other treatments, like CAR T-cell therapy, which genetically modifies a patient's cells to fight cancer, have left his immune system vulnerable. 'I'm slowly getting better, but I'm still living like we all were in the pandemic. I wear a mask in any crowded indoor place. I avoid super crowded places best I can.' But they've bought him precious time. 'Sometimes I walk down the street and shake my head and think, 'How have I survived this?'' he says. "It's not a stretch to say I'm a medical miracle." Nearly two years after his "mind-blowingly futuristic" CAR-T therapy, which he says left him feeling "reborn," Gluck says 'cancer-wise, I'm doing great.' He marvels over the scientific breakthroughs that have saved him each time his cancer returned. At the same time, he's prone to knocking on wood and kissing his knuckles for good measure. 'I've become quite superstitious,' he admits. The disease and treatments have left their marks, however: numbness in his fingers and toes, gastrointestinal problems and bone pain in his hips, spine and neck. He takes six pills, a powder and two liquid medicines daily. And every two months for the rest of his life he needs to get an immunoglobulin infusion to keep his immune system functioning— a procedure that can take up to five hours. It's a small price to pay, he says: 'The moment I was diagnosed, I tried to make a deal with God — 'Just let me see A.J.'s high school graduation.' In my wildest imagination, I didn't think it would happen.' But, as he says, "What better motivation do any of us have than staying alive for our kids?" Last month, he saw A.J. earn her college degree. Next year, his son Oscar will graduate from high school. 'When you're told you might have as little as a year and a half to live and you wind up seeing all these wonderful milestones, you know you're pretty lucky.'Twenty years ago, when Gluck was diagnosed with multiple myeloma, the disease 'was a death sentence,' says Dr. Hearn Jay Cho, chief medical officer with the Multiple Myeloma Research Foundation who is also a clinical professor of medicine at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mt. Sinai and an attending physician with the Multiple Myeloma Service at the Mt. Sinai Tisch Cancer Institute. 'We'd tell people to get their affairs in order because it was bad.'Life expectancy was two to three years. Today, there are 36,000 new cases of myeloma in the U.S., annually, and median survival is about 10 years, with many patients dying of something other than the disease. 'We've made incredible progress,' says drugs Revlimid and Velcade, introduced in 2006-2007, were 'game changers,' he says. 'Before, only about a third of patients had any response to conventional chemotherapy.' With those drugs, 60% to 80% of patients responded, and 'about a third would go into complete remission.' Stem cell transplant therapy and targeted monoclonal antibody drugs like Daratumumab further improved outcomes. Then, in 2021, the FDA first approved CAR T-cell therapy for myeloma, shown to be effective for patients, like Gluck, who'd relapsed after standard therapies.'You can keep patients alive and with good quality of life for a long time,' says Cho, who points out that's due to vital investment in science. 'The job's not done, and we need to finish it. A lot of people are working hard to come up with a cure. Someone like Jon Gluck is alive and kicking today because of medical research.'Read the original article on People
