ZERO ® – ADVANCED PROSTATE CANCER NEWS
WINTER 2024/2025
Q&A WITH DR. MORGANS Q
PROSTATE CANCER MEDICATIONS TOOL
What makes you feel optimistic about where we currently are in caring for people with advanced prostate cancer? How can patients ensure they’re getting the standard of care? What can patients do to ensure coordination among different specialists involved in their care? This can be a complicated task, and may be best supported by asking your team to send copies of the notes from your visits to other people on your care team. Usually, this can be done through the electronic medical record system. You also should have access to your data and notes on patient portals that are typically part of healthcare systems. You can share these directly with your doctors by printing them With so many new treatments and tests to think about, using trusted information from places like ZERO will be more important than ever. Other resources, including the American Cancer Society and the Prostate Cancer Foundation, are also reliable. For people who can travel, seeing a specialist for a second opinion in a National Cancer Institute-designated Comprehensive Cancer Center can also be a way to make sure that the care you are getting makes sense. I have never been more optimistic about what lies ahead for people with prostate cancer. Therapeutic developments are coming fast and furious, and the options for patients will continue to expand. In 2025, we are likely to see data from trials offering completely novel approaches to treatment, and doctors and patients will have more choices than ever before. out and bringing them to visits, if your doctor is not already getting notes. Trying to work with teams within a system who already practice together can also help.
Do you have trouble keeping track of prostate cancer drugs or get their names confused? ZERO developed
a list of FDA-approved prostate cancer drugs to provide information and clarity in one place.
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What role does palliative care play in advanced prostate cancer management? Palliative care specialists are experts in symptom management, as well as in helping people identify and maximize things in their lives that are important to them. I encourage anyone who has pain that is limiting enough to require daily use of narcotic pain medications to work with palliative care specialists if they are available. Patients will benefit from their expertise if the pain gets worse, or if other issues come up due to using narcotics (constipation, sleepiness). It is never wrong to work as aggressively to control symptoms as you do in fighting the cancer with cancer-directed treatments. A palliative care specialist is the person with that expertise, and they can be a critically important member of the care team. What promising research directions might impact advanced prostate cancer treatment in the near future? Newer targeted options are just around the corner, so be on the lookout for these. Some target genetic mutations, others are new radioligand treatments, and there will likely be use of the drugs that we have now in more settings, too. Treatments are also being developed for less common forms of prostate cancer, like small cell prostate cancer. I expect a lot of change in prostate cancer in 2025/2026, so we have a lot to look forward to.
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