Experience with immediate chemo treatment - Advanced prostate cancer

Your Dad has had the gold star treatment so his medical team would seem to be really on the ball. Early chemo is proving to be really beneficial for most men diagnosed with metastatic PCa. Although many others like my friend Allisons's OH have done really well without the chemo as well.

So much depends on the type of PCa ( I think figures show there are more than 20) how the cancer behaves, how aggressive it is and how quickly it adapts and becomes resilient to treatments.

I am Mo that Allison mentioned, my OH Mick was one of the unlucky ones, where nothing worked for more than a very short while. Thankfully cases like his are rare and as more is learnt from trials and all the incredible research that is going on, will become even rarer.

The fact that your Dad has had such a dramatic drop in PSA in a relatively short time and it sounds like he is doing really well on the back of Chemo, is a promising sign.

As Allison says with metastatic disease there is currently no cure, but there are lots of treatments that are having good results already, progress is being made with every new drug or treatment that comes to market. Although there is probably a long way to go for an effective screening test/programme, improving awareness and changing attitudes mean more and more Men are being tested and diagnosed at a cureable stage, work is ongoing to continue to raise awareness, to educate GPs and to provide them with better diagnostic information as well, so the future really is starting to look much better.

I wish you all the best

xx

Mo

Welcome to the forum. The fact is that no one can predict how long your father might live with this disease but he has had a great reaction to the hormone therapy so that's really good news. Just to give you an idea, my hubby was diagnosed at 61 with PSA 25 and g score of 10 and spread. That was over five years ago, our lovely friend Mo's husband was not so lucky, if you look at some of the profiles (for example alahays) you will see there is a great variation, he has been travelling this road for 8 years. So there's a lot of hope for your dad, early chemo is said to be a very good thing and the newer drugs have been very welcome, a few years ago there was very little to stop this disease, now there are options to keep men alive longer. Obviously, you know that once this cancer has metastasised it cannot be cured, only held back, but hopefully the length of time and quality of life for your dad will be good. Don't give up hope, Abiraterone, Enzalutimde and radium 223 were not available five years ago, who knows what the next five years will bring.

Kindest regards

Devonmaid