Bill Bixby, an actor known for his "Incredible Hulk" films and many other achievements, died of prostate cancer November 21,1993, having learned that he had the disease in April of 1991. He died at age 59.
This article from 1994, soon after his death, findarticles.com/p/articles... gives a bit of a historical view of where we were thirty years ago. PSA was a new thing then. Lupron was beginning to be used around 1989, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leupr....
Not much can be gleaned about his battle from online articles of his death. He discovered his PC when he was "ill". He was "very weak" for a week or so before he died. He had surgery and chemotherapy in December of 1991. And he died from "complications of Prostate Cancer".
THE Incredible Hulk (in photo above Bixby), was played by Lou Ferrigno, who is still alive today. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lou_F...
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Frank Zappa died from prostate cancer the same year. He probably wasn't going to a doctor but in any case he didn't know until he was in a lot of pain.
The increased incidence of prostate cancer has led to remarkable changes in diagnosis and treatment over the past century. What were the first ways in which prostate cancer was treated, and how did these evolve into the variety of therapeutic strategies from which patients have to choose today?
In 1853, J. Adams, a surgeon at The London Hospital, described the first case of prostate cancer, which he discovered by histological examination1. Adams noted in his report that this condition was “a very rare disease”. Remarkably, 150 years later, prostate cancer has become a significant health problem. In the United States, it is the most commonly diagnosed cancer in men, with 180,000 new cases and about 31,000 deaths occurring annually2. This dramatic increase in the number of prostate cancer cases can be attributed to several causes. First, prostate cancer was not differentiated from other types of urinary obstruction until the early 1900s. Second, the incidence of prostate cancer increases more rapidly with age than any other cancer type2. The number of cases has risen as the average life expectancy has increased over the past century. Third, the increased incidence seems to be, in some way, related to the ‘Western’ lifestyle: the incidence of clinical prostate cancer is significantly lower in Asian populations, compared with Western populations3, and it increases in men who have emigrated to Western nations, indicating some type of environmental or dietary effect3.
This increased incidence has led to remarkable changes in the diagnosis and treatment of prostate cancer over the past century. Fifty years ago, the typical patient was a man in his early seventies who was diagnosed with metastases to the bone and/or soft tissues. Characteristically, these lesions were bulky and histologically poorly differentiated. Diagnosis at such an advanced disease status was a death sentence, with patients dying within 1–2 years. In the 1940s, Charles Huggins (FIG. 1a) found that metastatic prostate cancer responds to androgen-ablation therapy, which heralded the beginning of a new era of prostate cancer therapy4. Remarkably, medical castration with oral oestrogens became the first effective systemic treatment for any cancer, and, to this day, androgen ablation remains the most generally useful prostate cancer therapy.
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