August 11, 2005

CREDIT: Ray Smith, CanWest News Service

Dave Smith is a cancer survivor.

Eight years ago, things weren't looking good for retired engineer Dave
Smith, who had advanced and inoperable prostate cancer. Today, however,
Mr. Smith is in good health, thanks to an experimental prostate cancer
treatment devised by Victoria oncologist Dr. Charles Ludgate.

For Mr. Smith, then 69, treatment involved taking hormones for a year,
then radiation, then more hormones.

"I owe my life to Dr. Ludgate," says the retired University of Calgary
chancellor, whose cancer never returned and who lives near Victoria.

The hormone therapy reduces the prostate specific antigen (PSA), which
is secreted by the prostate and linked to cancer activity.

"What's really impressive is, over the past nine years, we've had no
deaths among patients whose PSAs we've driven down to 0.1 or less with
hormone treatment, which is almost all of them," Dr. Ludgate says.

These latest findings caught the eye of editors at the International
Journal of Radiation, Oncology and Biology, who rushed to publish his
results in the current issue. "We've been exploring the use of hormones
since the mid-eighties, looking at treatment of one year, two years,
three years," says Dr. Deborah Kuban, an oncologist and a member of the
journal's editorial board.

"What is really valuable and significant about Dr. Ludgate's work is
[that] he is telling us that hormone therapy length is not as important
as what happens with the PSA.

All his patients had high PSAs to start with, but in cases where they
fell to 0.1 or less before radiation, patients did best."

knowledge is power - growing old is mandatory - growing wise is optional    
"Many more men die with prostate cancer than of it. Growing old is
invariably fatal. Prostate cancer is only sometimes so."
http://community.webtv.net/PALMER_ENT/doc