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Interactive online prostate cancer program offers info tailored to individual man

Provided by: Canadian Press
Written by: SHERYL UBELACKER

TORONTO (CP) - Getting screened for possible prostate cancer or receiving a positive diagnosis can leave men perplexed and anxious about what their test results mean and their best options for further testing or treatment.

So the Prostate Cancer Research Foundation of Canada has come up with an interactive online program that it hopes will help men cut through all the extraneous information and misinformation and offer answers tailored to their individual cases.

On Tuesday, the foundation website ([url]www.prostatecancer.ca)[/url] will begin providing a comprehensive collection of prostate cancer assessment tools (PCATs), designed to give men the most accurate and up-to-date scientific data available to help them make informed treatment decisions with their doctors.

"We think that overall men are heavily into denial and refuse to ask certain questions, refuse to go and get tested," foundation president John Blanchard said in an interview Monday. "We think if we can put together some easily understood ways that they can privately assess where they're at, it will open their eyes."

This year, an estimated 20,700 Canadian men will be diagnosed with prostate cancer and about 4,200 will die from the disease.

"It will help them to make smarter decisions, particularly with the advice to get their GP involved . . . and that's going to save their life," said Blanchard, noting that the website will begin by offering three PCATs.

The PCATs, which will reach a dozen in number by March and are offered in both French and English, will allow a man to plug in his own test result scores, including levels of prostate specific antigen, or PSA, which can indicate the presence of cancer in the walnut-sized gland.

"The series of prostate cancer assessment tools that is going to be uploaded to the website are really designed to start to layer in information about: What is the likelihood that you have prostate cancer based on an initial PSA test and a rectal examination," said Dr. Robert Bristow, chair of the foundation's scientific advisory committee.

"And if you have a diagnosis of prostate cancer, what is the likelihood that you have aggressive disease versus non-aggressive disease?" said Bristow, a radiation oncologist at Princess Margaret Hospital in Toronto.

"So what's unique about this particular website is that it puts both those pieces of information together on the website for individual information for the patients."

Based on PSA levels over time and other personal health data, the program calculates a man's risk of malignancy. That should help doctor and patient decide whether to go ahead with a biopsy to test for cancer, said Bristow, especially since about 80 per cent of biopsies come back negative.

"We'd like to prevent as many biopsies as possible that aren't needed," he said, explaining that the procedure causes discomfort and carries a small risk infection and bleeding.

If already diagnosed, the PCATs will help a man understand his prognosis and the treatment options at various stages of the disease, Bristow added.

"The PCATs give individualized information to the men who would otherwise go to 30 other different websites and never know which information is germane to their case or not. But in this particular case, they can put their specific values into the website and get back information pertaining to things like what is the probability that cancer cells have spread."

That was the case for retired accountant Bud Funnell of Kitchener, Ont., who had his cancerous prostate surgically removed six years ago, followed by radiation. Three years later, doctors found that the cancer had spread to his lymph nodes, so he now takes intermittent hormone therapy to keep the disease in check.

His search for answers about his condition followed the pattern that Bristow said most men take - wading through reams of facts, figures and speculations on the Net, in articles and in books.

"There's a lot of information out there but it's not scientific and there's a lot of uncertainty and a lot of differing opinions on things," Funnell said. "The worst thing when you're first diagnosed is collecting enough information that will help you deal with it and help you make decisions."

"Now we have proper tools based on actual scientific data," he said of the foundation's website addition, "and I can't help but think it's got to be a good thing."

Blanchard came up with the idea for the interactive package, which was created in conjunction with urologic oncologist Dr. Pierre Karakiewicz, director of the Cancer Prognostics and Health Outcomes Unit at the University of Montreal Health Centre. The PCATs were originally developed for doctors and are based on extensive data from clinical trials involving thousands of men worldwide.

While other websites exist for prostate cancer patients that provide interactive assessment tools based on nomograms - a graphical calculating device, Blanchard said the Canadian foundation's package is more user-friendly and will be more comprehensive than others once it is complete. New scientific data will be incorporated as it becomes available.

"Our series of 12 assessment tools covers a very broad range, the natural history of the disease. That means at any one point, a man and his doctor can spot where they are on this continuum, choose the right nomogram and fill in the data and get an answer to a simple question."

Source:
Men's Health
Medbroadcast.com
http://www.medbroadcast.com/channel_health_news_details.asp?news_id=10724&channel_id=1002&relation_id=0&newsletterid=5473