This forum is for the discussion of anything to do with Prostate Cancer. There are only four rules:
No fundraisers, no commercials (although it is OK to recommend choices of treatment or medical people based on your personal research; invitations to participate in third-party surveys are also acceptable, provided there is no compensation to YANA);
No harvesting e-mail addresses for Spam;
No insults or flaming - be polite and respectful at all times and understand that there may be a variety of points of view, all of which may have some validity;
Opinions are OK, but please provide as much factual evidence as possible for any assertions that you are making
Failure to abide by these simple rules will result in the immediate and permanent suspension of your posting privileges.
Since this is an International Forum, please specify your location in your post.
Anyone interested in this critical study might like to read Mike Scott's comments in a presentation on the otucome of the study at The New Prostate Cancer Infolink
Like virtually every other issue on prostate cancer, this study is not without controversary.
One of the points that I always look for in this kind of study is the relationship between total deaths and prostate cancer specific deaths. In Mike's summary he says that almost half the men in the study died during the time of the study, but only 7% of the deaths were due to prostate cancer.
This is not unexpected because prostate cancer accounts for about 3% of all male deaths, a figure that has not changed signifcantly since 1976 in the USA.
As Dr Willet Whitmore said many years ago
Growing old is invariably fatal while prostate cancer is only sometimes so.
