I looked at two clinical trials and, while neither clinical trial met its endpoint for efficacy, PSADT in the majority of patients lengthened. It would be nice to have statistics for how PSADT changes at random (binned by cancer stage and aggressiveness, time, etc).
That's why PSADT can't be used without a control group. Here's the Johns Hopkins analysis:
"These data suggest that calculated PSADT in BRPC may naturally increase over time in the absence of therapy and may be influenced by duration of PSA follow-up. As a result, single arm trials could show false significant increases despite the lack of active treatment of these patients. Placebo-controlled RCTs including clinical endpoints are recommended to screen novel agents in men with BRPC to mitigate bias because of natural PSADT variability."
It is lacking in so many studies it makes many of them useless.I assume funding issues or poor design.
Something that would help (obviously not perfect but better than nothing) would be to do one study each year of untreated PSADT, PSA increase/decrease, WBC changes, etc, etc. Then store it as a reference "control" study. At least that would give me something to work with.
I'm thinking of one study a year so that we would amass more data points over time and the individual "control" studies could include thousands of people.
Do you know if something like that exists? If not I can attempt to glean out that data by searching for studies with controls with the desired metrics.
Uncontrolled studies aree usually used as preliminary- if there is no increase in PSADT, they won't bother with a controlled study. You seem to be gaining understanding that most studies are worthless for clinical decision-making. That is true. The studies are done for hypothesis generation only. Most posts of studies on this forum contain no analysis of the research method used, which is critical to understanding its validity.
You have to randomize each set of patients for each trial. That is the only way to ensure that the average treatment patient is nearly identical to the average control patient. There can be no "standard sets."
Statistical manipulations can tell, within a predetermined level of confidence, if the change in PSA velocity/DT can be attributed to some cause-redult or being random even on an individual basis. But, it takes many sample points to get the needed confidence. When a sub set is examined there is this (N+1)/N factor which, ignoring everything else, neccecitates 20, or more, samples for max 95% certainty. This translates to 20 monthly PSA tests prior and 20 post the intervention in order to be able to discern if something is working or not.
I don't think that the two studies I saw can be attributed to anything but random chance. It's possible that it wasn't but not worth my time and money when there are a few other things that have more solid data.
Acai is just like other berries such as Blackberry, Elderberry, Blueberry etc. They all have strong anti oxidant and anti inflammatory effects besides having vitamins and minerals..and thus, help slowing cancer cell growth. Any berry which slows ageing can slow cancer growth.
But... if your treatment relies on oxidative damage to kill the cancer cells (particularly radiation), then antioxidants make treatment less effective. Cancer is complicated, even within a single patient there will be different genetic mutations in different cancer cells. Treatments work through a variety of mechanisms. It's impossible to make universal claims about anything.
Generally, when something is found to be helpful, it's concentrated and turned into a drug. Taxane chemotherapy is derived from the needles of a yew tree. Irinotecan is derived from periwinkles. If we could just make an herbal tea from yew needles and periwinkles, we could cure cancer naturally
In a patient suffering from cancer more than 99 % of the cells in the body are non- cancerous (normal) The task is to ensure that any of these 99+% cells do not turn cancerous. The remaining tiny fraction of total which are cancerous are fragile and have limited life span.
These cancerous cells are very busy reproducing due to insecurity about their own death. Any change in environment around them by drugs, chemo or radiation or cytotoxic natural substances can kill them easily.
And do not ever forget the role of our immune system Keeping non cancerous cells from becoming cancerous and stregthening our immune system is essential to thwart the uncontrolled growth of cancer cells.
If we only focus on killing that less than 1% cancerous population.. we will keep doing it again and again as more non cancerous cells will keep turning cancerous.
Yes.. food and natural substances are medicines...or better mother of medicines !
I believe you have this completely backwards. In December my CT scan showed that about 50% of my liver was neuroendocrine cancer. At the time I could care less about the risk of healthy cells turning cancerous, and was entirely focused on killing as many cancer cells as possible before their rapid growth overwhelmed my liver's ability to keep me alive. They may be fragile and short lived, but they make up for that by dividing insanely fast.
Your attitude was more applicable when I was hormone sensitive with an undetectable PSA and able to run a half marathon.
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