dad

Ed, I'm very sorry to hear about your Dad. Some of the guys who know a lot more about those medications will no doubt weight in today. Once again, my condolences for the loss of your Dad.

Mike

So sorry to hear about your father.

I don't know about side effects of those treatments. However, the rapid body weight loss, sometimes called "wasting", in cancer patients seems to far exceed what could be lost by simple lack of nutrition. If you simply stop eating it's hard to lose 10 pounds a week. That's on the order of 36000 calories deficit, or over 5000 per day. A resting person's body only burns typically 1500-1800 a day, so something else seems to be happening. The medical term I've heard is cachexia, essentially an unstoppable rapid weight loss, seen in end-stage cancers.

I watched my brother in law become a living skeleton by the end of his pancreatic cancer, from relatively normal to unsurvivable in about 3 months. Perhaps the high metabolic rate of cancer itself consumes all those calories. I don't know, but it's dramatic, and it just seems far too fast for simple malnutrition to explain.

Jerry

Very sorry to hear about your father. I am on Zytiga and 66 yo, and would love to make it to age 85. And you bring up a good point: at what stage of this cancer do we want to keep taking meds if it only gives us a few more months. I suppose each person has to individually ask themselves that question.

I hope that your father left you with a lifetime of wonderful memories.
Michael

Very sorry for the loss of your dad. I just lost my dad and his wife in a house fire on February 2. While he was diagnosed with PCA at age 70, he had been in good health up until the fire. Please remember all of the good times!

I'm sorry for your loss. I can't comment on what did or didn't contribute, but I know from my mother's cancer that after a certain point, eating actually fuels the cancer faster than the person. This was explained to me by an oncological dietician, when I complained she wasn't eating enough. The cancer begins to take up a large portion of the body's volume and it is highly metabolically active - greedily taking all the calories consumed.

I agree that our medicines for those late stages are woefully inadequate and only add a few months of life. That's why there is a push to use them sooner in the disease process. Taxotere, for example adds a median of 17 months to the lifespan of a man with multiple mets who is still hormone responsive, but adds only 4 months after he has become castrate resistant. There is also potential for hormone therapies, especially multiple ones in combination with growth factor inhibitors and immune enhancers.

jay - that's tragic about the fire - we have so little control over life and death.

- Allen