The findings that the death rate for men is higher than that for women is not surprising:
"Officials recorded a 2.8% fatality rate for male patients versus 1.7% for women."
Women tend to launch a vigorous assault on viral insults, whereas men with normal-high testosterone [T] have a more muted response. Men respond less well to flu shots [1]. The dowside for women is a greater risk of autoimmune disease.
Men using high-dose estradiol to induce castrate levels of T might be expected to have an edge if exposed to the new coronavirus.
But what about men on conventional ADT. who have castrate T & consequently very low levels of estradiol? Regardless of ADT method, removal of T causes the involuted thymus to regenerate [2]. That should have a positive effect on immune response.
Thanks a lot, pjoshea13, for these very important informations for us. My husband had a epithelial thymoma 20 years ago, stage IV, and several surgeries and RTs. Now he has still a dozen of encapsulated thymoma nodes remaining, but a thymoma doesn't invade the body with mets and the encapsulated nodes are still at the same size since 2010, since he's taking curcumin every day.
After the diagnosis of PCa Gleason 9, stage IV and a RP end of 2018, he refused ADT treatment. Now, after reading the link about thymus growing which occurs when testosterone is suppressed, I wonder if the thymoma wouldn't have come back when my husband hadn't refused any ADT. No oncologist could tell us about a correlation between his PCa and his epihelial Thymoma. And nobody warned him against ADT. Do you also think that it would be a risk for him to undergo a hormone therapy?
That's the link found in your wikipedia article about the Thymus:
Thymoma is rare, & I wonder if the average oncologist would know enough to answer your question. You might try to find an expert in the field.
I can't give you an answer, but I understand why you have concerns - I would too.
I was interested to read the following [1]:
"We identified 668 patients with thymoma from the Swedish Cancer Registry, and 2,719 population-based matched controls. We obtained information on autoimmunity from the nationwide inpatient/outpatient hospital discharge Registry."
"Compared with controls, thymoma patients were more likely to have an autoimmune disease at some point during their lives (32.7% vs. 2.4%, respectively ...), most frequently myasthenia gravis (24.5%), systemic lupus erythematosus (2.4%) and red cell aplasia (1.2%)."
"Thymoma patients had twofold excess risk for second cancers compared with the general population, most notably: non-melanoma skin cancer (SIR = 10.6 ...), non-Hodgkin lymphoma (SIR = 6.8 ...), ... endocrine (SIR = 4.7 ...), and prostate cancer (SIR = 3.0 ...)."
An anecdotal case from Japan in 1989 [2]:
"A case of prostatic cancer treated with an LH-RH analogue depo-preparation was found to have a mediastinal thymoma which was later removed by surgery. The association of thymoma and prostatic cancer has not been documented in the world literature, and it remains to be elucidated whether the occurrence of the both tumors is a coincidence or etiologically inter-related."
Thymoma has been detected in some PCa patients undergoing modern imaging [3] [4] [5] [6], etc., but there is no suggestion of unusual frequency or connection to ADT.
Thank you so much for your reply and all what you found about thymoma. Thank God my husband had neither myasthenia nor one of the other sideeffects they described with this cancer. But nobody told him that he is on risk to develop another one. The MO only checked every year the progression of this thymoma and in September 2018 after a scan the oncologist told him that he can consider that he has beaten his cancer ( the thymoma). And on the same scan they detected the PCa which was extracapsular. The start of a new battle... the second since 1996, when he was only 45.
There's another angle to this coronavirus that is worth mentioning. I've heard that in the US up to 70% of our pharmaceuticals are sourced from China either directly or as precursors in a supply chain. Will that impact availability or cost of ADT or other prostate cancer related drugs or drugs like antibiotics?
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