This is a lesson that the preeminent Colin Powell knew very well.

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“When I was diagnosed with prostate cancer at 66, I  wasn’t terribly surprised or shocked,” says Powell, a retired four-star United States Army general, 65th United States Secretary of State, and former National Security Advisor, Commander of the U.S. Army Forces Command, and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. “For the five years before that, I had been going for very regular checkups and my PSA was always high. It floated up and down. PSA alone doesn’t  indicate cancer, it just says something is going on.”

Thankfully, Powell had the knowledge he needed to deal with this challenge, in addition to the understanding that cancer doesn’t care about reputation. In fact, Powell had been tracking and preparing for the diagnosis for several years. He was so diligent about watching for potential issues with his prostate that he had already gone through two biopsies before the third turned up positive for cancer.

“At that point, I knew sooner or later that something would show up,” he says. “And because I’m black, I have a higher propensity for prostate cancer than white folks do.”

Powell’s proactive approach to diagnosis then turned to a treatment strategy after consulting with his longtime doctor and bringing in a radiologist.

“I was just at the age where I decided, ‘I don’t want to fool with this, I don’t want to think about it’ and so I decided to go for the radical prostatectomy [removal of the prostate gland], as opposed to the radiation treatment,” he says. “As Secretary of State, I didn’t want to face the prospect of regular radiation therapy, as opposed to doing it all at once and taking care of it.”

Due to his high profile, Powell didn’t make his surgery public until the actual morning of the procedure. He was back at the State Department less than a week after the surgery, and with the support of his wife, children and office assistants, jumped right back into his daily routine.

While the choice to remove his prostate was something others facing treatments might not opt for today, Powell doesn’t want the impact of his individual story to get lost.

“The important point is that it is vitally important for men, particularly as you get older—say the age of 40 and beyond—to be regularly evaluated and go through the somewhat unpleasant procedures they
take you through, because it could be lifesaving,” he says. “Place a premium on taking care of yourself and getting the examination. I’m a great believer in preventive medicine…when something
is wrong, don’t hide it, look away from it and pretend it’s not there. Deal with it.”

New Advances In Prostate Therapy

According to the CDC, African American men have the highest incidence of prostate cancer of any race in the U.S. and are more than two times more likely to die from the disease. In fact, prostate cancer is the fourth leading cause of death in African American men.

Unfortunately, this means that receiving a prostate cancer diagnosis is something many Black men will encounter in their lifetime. How a man responds to this news can be a matter of life and death.

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After you’re diagnosed with prostate cancer, it’s very important to make the necessary lifestyle changes that will improve the quality of your life.

According to Dr. Thomas Farrington, prostate cancer survivor and president and founder of the Prostate Health Education Network (PHEN), here are some of the top things a man with prostate cancer needs to stay healthy.

1. Knowledge

“Knowledge is the best tool to help you survive,” Dr. Farrington says. “Black men need to ask ‘should I be treated or go into active surveillance?’ ‘What is my stage of cancer?’ ‘Surgery or radiation?’ Men don’t understand that you must continue to be diligent in post-prostate cancer treatment.”

There are many resources available to learn about prostate cancer facts and treatments, such as PHEN and the National Comprehensive Cancer Network.

Dr. Farrington also stressed an underlying reason for men to educate themselves about recommended lifestyle habits and possible treatments, in addition to maintaining a higher quality of post-cancer life – prostate cancer recurrence.

“Just because you’ve received treatment doesn’t mean the cancer can’t come back, so men to know about available treatments, particularly new treatments that are on the horizon. An example of this is an exiting new treatment that addresses prostate cancer recurrences called Provenge, which uses the body’s own immune system to fight cancer. Many insurance companies cover this, and it’s important for men to be aware of this new option.”

2. The Right Diet

It can be very difficult to adhere to a balanced cancer diet, particularly during treatment, while your body is working overtime to fight the cancer and repair healthy cells that may have been damaged as a side effect of treatments like chemotherapy and radiation. At the same time, many cancer treatments, such as radiation, can leave you weak and without an appetite – this makes it both challenging, yet crucial, to get in those essential nutrients, vitamins, and minerals your body needs in order to fight and regain strength.

“You really do need to be concerned with your diet,” says Dr. Farrington. “One key aspect of a prostate cancer diet is being lower in fat.”

Experts also recommend reducing animal fat in your diet. Studies show that excess fat, primarily red meat and high-fat dairy, stimulates prostate cancer growth. In addition, avoid trans fatty acids (found in margarines, fried and baked goods) and high-calcium diets, which are also both known to promote cancer growth.

Foods known to help aid in maintaining prostate health include:

The U.S. Senate passed a resolution Thursday acknowledging that awareness and prevention of the disease is as critical as it’s ever been for African American men.

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The Senate resolution, which was introduced by Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.), urges federal agencies to address what they’re now calling an “epidemic” by supporting education, awareness outreach and research specifically focused on how prostate cancer affects black men.

Prostate cancer is the leading type of cancer in men in the United States, with over 240,000 men diagnosed and 30,000 thousand dying from it each year. Also, for reasons that are not completely understood, African-American men have the highest rates of prostate cancer in the U.S, as 1 in 5 will get prostate cancer in their lifetime. African-Americans are also 60% more likely to be diagnosed with prostate cancer and 2.5 times likely to die of the disease.

Based on data collected from hospitals in three states, black men who had their prostates removed were more likely to need blood transfusions, stay in the hospital longer and die while hospitalized compared to white men.

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They also had lower quality of care, the research suggested. Compared to whites, black men were 27 percent less likely to have their surgery at a hospital that routinely removes prostates and 33 percent less likely to be seen by a surgeon experienced in the procedure, known as radical prostatectomy.

According to the American Cancer Society, over 241,000 men will be diagnosed with prostate cancer in the U.S. in 2012, and over 28,000 will die from it.

Black men seem to be disproportionately represented in both of those numbers. They are 59 percent more likely to develop prostate cancer and more than twice as likely to die from it compared to white men, according to earlier research.

“There seems to be some event that happens after diagnosis that leads to worse outcomes,” said Dr.Daniel Barocas, the study’s lead author and an assistant professor of urologic surgery at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee.

It could be that black men choose different or less aggressive treatments than white men, said Barocas. He and his team decided to look specifically at whether quality of care differs by race.

The researchers consulted information on 105,972 adult men who had their prostates removed because of cancer at hospitals in Florida, Maryland and New York between 1996 and 2007.

Of those, 81,112 patients were white and 14,006 were black.

Because the number of surgeries performed at a hospital or by a surgeon can be used as a measure of procedure quality, the researchers compared the experience level of the hospitals and doctors that treated white and black men.

For this study, a hospital was considered “high volume” if it did about two surgeries per month or more, while surgeons were considered experienced if they did about one per month.

The researchers found that 59 percent of black men in the study went to a high-volume surgeon, compared to 70 percent of white men.

The problem with Americans today is that they are lazy. Yes, I said it – LAZY.

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There are really just three simple, sustainable habits that will help most people avoid the most feared medical condition – CANCER.

It is simple, really: don’t smoke cigarettes, eat a nutritious diet, exercise and maintain a healthy weight.

Smoking

The risk of an enlarged prostate, also called benign prostatic hyperplasia or BPH, increases about 4 percent a year after age 55. By age 60, half of men will have BPH. That number jumps to 95 percent by age 85.

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While prostate cancer death is preventable, it’s also relatively simple to prevent prostate cancer from showing up in the first place. Lifestyle habits, including health eating, play a crucial part of this.

What Does Diet Have To Do With It?

A recent article in a medical journal looked at the effects of diet and supplements on prostate health. The following lifestyle factors were associated with a lower risk of BPH:

“I was diagnosed in 2008 but I am now cancer-free…once I received a national platform I wanted to speak in the communities about  having this conversation in your home.”

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When asked about how he maintains his longevity in the music industry, Charlie details how it contributes from his passion to keep releasing records, staying healthy and give fans a great show!

“My band is really young so everybody has the energy level that I require. We level off at the top so if you don’t have the energy, you can’t be in my band.”

Visit Magic 102.1 for Charlie’s interview and video.

Prostate Cancer – The Causes

When you’re told you have prostate cancer, it’s natural to wonder what may have caused the disease. But no one knows the exact causes of prostate cancer. Doctors seldom know why one man develops prostate cancer and another doesn’t.

But on Monday, May 21, 2012, U.S. Preventive Services Task Force, an independent group of medical experts in prevention and evidence-based medicine, advised that physicians no longer offer routine screening for prostate cancer with the PSA (prostate specific antigen) blood test.

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Previous guidelines had stated that most men should undergo screening for prostate cancer with the PSA blood test beginning at age 50 or much earlier if they’re at high risk for prostate cancer.

The task force’s reasoning for recommending against routine PSA screening in men without symptoms was that routine screening often lead to the over-diagnosis of prostate cancer and unnecessary treatment that can leave men impotent and incontinent. The task force concluded screening may only help one man in every 1,000 to avoid dying from prostate cancer; whereas up to five in 1,000 men will die within a month of prostate cancer surgery, the panel said, and between 10 and 70 per 1,000 men will suffer lifelong adverse effects, such as urinary incontinence, erectile dysfunction and bowel dysfunction.

So how does this new recommendation relate to black men’s health? About 242,000 new cases of prostate cancer will be diagnosed in Americans this year, and about 28,000 will die from it, according to the U.S. National Cancer Institute. Prostate cancer is the fourth most common cause of death in black men.

Here are a few more unfortunate facts about prostate cancer in black men:

• The worldwide incidence of prostate cancer is higher among American black men than any other male group.

• Black men in America continue to have the highest incidence rate of prostate cancer in the world — 180.6 per 100,000 population.

• Between 1996 and 2000 in the United States, the death rate of prostate cancer among black men was more than double that of white men.

The recommendation by the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force will not be a surprise to cancer specialists…contrary to the controversial recommendations that the same panel made regarding breast cancer screening in 2009.

No major medical group recommends routine PSAs, and the government panel’s guidelines had long advised men over 75 to forgo them. The new recommendation extends that do-not-screen advice to healthy men of all ages.

Yet, the vast majority of men over 50 have had at least one PSA blood test. The assumption is that finding cancer early is always a good thing.

Not so, said Dr. Virginia Moyer of the Baylor College of Medicine, who heads the task force.

“We have put a huge amount of time, effort and energy into PSA screening and that time, effort and energy, that passion, should be going into finding a better test instead of using a test that doesn’t work,” Moyer told The Associated Press late Thursday.

Too much PSA, or prostate-specific antigen, in the blood only sometimes signals prostate cancer is brewing. It also can mean a benign enlarged prostate or an infection. Worse, screening often detects small tumors that will prove too slow-growing to be deadly. And there’s no sure way to tell in advance who needs aggressive therapy.

The task force analyzed all the previous research on this subject, including five major studies, to evaluate whether routine screening reduces deaths from prostate cancer. The conclusion: There’s little if any mortality benefit.

But there is harm from routine screening: impotence, incontinence, infections, even death that can come from the biopsies, surgery and radiation, Moyer said. One study estimated 2 of every 5 men whose prostate cancer was caught through a PSA test had tumors too slow-growing to ever be a threat.

Yet Moyer said 30 percent of men who are treated for PSA-discovered prostate cancer suffer significant side effects, sometimes death, from the resulting treatment. About a third of men ages 40 to 60 have brewing prostate cancer but “the huge majority of them will never know it in their lifetime if they are not screened,” she added.

The task force previously had considered the evidence for or against PSA screening inconclusive. The new recommendation says not to routinely screen. That recommendation is a draft that is open for public comment beginning next week.

“We have been long concerned, and it has been apparent for some years, that some supporters of prostate cancer screening have overstated, exaggerated and in some cases misled men about the evidence supporting its effectiveness,” said Dr. Otis Brawley of the American Cancer Society in a statement. “We need balanced, truthful information to be made widely available to physicians and patients when making important health decisions.”

The society had not seen the new recommendation yet, but has long advised men to consider the pros and cons of PSA screening before deciding on their own.

 Black men tend to have significantly higher rates of prostate cancer, and the disease tends to be more advanced and harder to cure at the time of diagnosis.

• Black men have a higher chance of dying from their prostate cancer and should therefore start prostate cancer screening with yearly PSA tests and physical exams at age 40, and even earlier if a strong family history of prostate cancer exists.

• In 2007, African American men were 1.4 times, respectively, more likely to have new cases of prostate cancer, as compared to non-Hispanic white men.