Pushing three years ago now, someone close to me was diagnosed with prostate cancer. Without going into too much detail, the prognosis he was given was not good, and the impression he was given was that there was, essentially, nothing he could do that would alter his condition. A timetable was mapped out, with depressing certainty on the part of the doctor as to the apparently inevitable progress of the cancer. The doctor in question was very convincing, too, and did a good job of stripping away hope and optimism.
One of the advantages of always thinking you know better than everyone else, even experts in their fields, is that just occasionally, when it really matters, it turns out that you're right. I had no real reason to think the doctor wrong, but I really, really wanted him to be wrong, and did a lot of research into what would help. And the doctor was wrong: his timetable has already passed. The individual's PSA has fallen dramatically, from a rather high number down to what the lab calls "less than 0.1": below that which they can meaningfully measure. It has taken a lot of hard work, both on his part, and on that of his wife.
I've been uncertain about writing this post: I'm not a doctor, and the statistical sample involved here is low (only a few people, now). But on the basis of the precautionary principle, I thought I should write some of this down for other people to use as they wish. I've provided links to studies and news items where I have them freely available (not where I am using my work sources: unfortunately those cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to get access to). In a couple of cases to do with calcium, where no accessible news item of similar summary is available, I've had to cite actual papers (with links to abstracts). Since they're invariably virtually unreadable in their complexity, my apologies.
Enough backstory. Here is the good stuff.
Diet
Stop drinking milk. Seriously. The exact mechanisms involved in the growth of prostate cancer are not fully understood, but one important factor seems to be the amount of intracelluar free calcium in your body. Cut out as much of this as you can, by looking at what in your diet is rich in calcium, especially dairy foods. Of course, calcium is important to your body in things like maintaining bone strength, so make sure and maintain bone mass through exercise, below. Iin any case, you'll never get all the calcium out of your diet.
Cut back on processed sugar: cancer as a disease seems to be a glycophile: it loves sugar. Consider not consuming quite as much processed sugar in your diet.
Avoid red meats and animal fats. Asian men have low rates of prostate cancer, right up until the point where they start eating western diets, rich in the animal fats they eat less of originally. Especially avoid hormone-laden, intensively farmed red meats. If you think that giving up beefburgers is too high a price to pay, then fair enough, but you were warned!
On the other hand, there are things you should try to eat and drink more of. Soy protein seems to be helpful, as it contains isoflavones which are thought to help fight cancer.
Drink pomegranate juice. There is some evidence from the UCLA that this could be really very important indeed. If you can get unpasteurised pomegranate juice, so much the better: this is what the UCLA used in their study. It seems to dramatically slow the spread of the cancer in many men. Here is a quote from the UCLA's latest summary of their study, published just yesterday:
"The initial study, involving 50 patients, found that the average time it took for PSA levels to double among prostate cancer patients drinking the juice was 54 months, nearly four times the doubling time of 15 months at the start of the study. Patients who have short doubling times are more likely to die from their cancer."
Lycopenes are pretty fashionable right now, and study after study has been publicised fairly broadly about their cancer-fighting or preventing qualities. You can get them in pill form, but you can get a lot of them from tomatoes, if they are prepared correctly. For best results, lightly fry tomatoes in olive oil. But tomato ketchup or tomato-based sauces are great, too.
Consume vitamin D in moderation. And get some sunlight: your body creates huge amounts of vitamin D when exposed to only moderate sunlight. Vitamin D seems to help fight prostate cancer.
Eat cruciferous vegetables: cauliflower, broccoli, and the much-maligned brussels sprout are believed to have roles in fighting cancer. Blueberries contain powerful antioxidant chemicals, and are well worth eating if you can. Green tea (and soy protein, mentioned above) also contain antioxidants. Green tea in particular has been a focus of interest, and results have been mixed: cancer is a complex state-machine and some elements perhaps block or enhance each other. But some evidence does suggest a useful role for green tea.
Basically, cut back on meat as much as you feel you can, and eat vegetables, pulses, fruits and the like. Fish, especially wild fish, are probably pretty good for you.
Exercise
Once you have prostate cancer, weight seems to matter. Overweight men are less likely to develop prostate cancer. But once they have it, slim men are more likely to survive. This could be due to a combination of lifestyle factors, including diet as well as exercise. But exercising is pretty unlikely to harm you, and if it is the difference between living and dying, motivation should be a bit easier.
To be more assertive about it, there are more and more studies showing a link between exercise and control of prostate cancer progression.
Also, if you are cutting back on calcium then you need to maintain bone mass. No matter what you do, there will still be calcium in your diet. You want your body to be using it for what it's good for. For this, you want to do some moderately high-impact exercise, like running.
Attitude
Everyone knows, these days, that a positive attitude is really important to surviving cancer. I'm not going to go into that bit.
At my work, we spend most of our time thinking about the middle east, and other oil-producing states. But a portion of our staff are pharmaceuticals analysts, so I get to speak to them, and to use one of the best databases in the world on treatment developments.
Three years ago, there was still a lot of dubiety over the causes and the mechanisms involved in prostate cancer. There have been big advances over that time, and a range of treatments are developing. Three years ago there was no approved treatment for hormone-refractory prostate cancer. All the money seemed to be going into the politically-organised fight against breast cancer. Now there are life-extending treatments like taxotere, and more on the way, like the first ever therapeutic anti-cancer vaccine, Provenge, which was recomended for FDA approval only a couple of days ago. There are a range of other treatments in the trial stage, most of which will probably fail, but some of which might succeed.
The stuff I've mentioned here is all about managing your condition, not curing it. But with such work going into finding treatments, it is surely worth doing the hard work in diet and exercise that will mean still being around when the scientists arrive at a cure. And if you are eating and exercising in the manner I've described above then you're pretty likely to find yourself a lot healthier than the people around you who don't have cancer.