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Aspirin and Pomegranate: PSA result

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Posted 1/24/2011 7:50 PM (GMT -5)
As I have mentioned previously, I have been trialing both daily aspirin (100mg) and pomegranate juice (200ml) for the most of the 3-monthly interval between my last two PSA tests.

The result is in: latest PSA is 0.4, previously it was 0.3.

So my conclusion is that aspirin and pomegranate are having no effect -- my PSA continues on its trend of doubling every 6-7 months.

However, as I did not take them for quite the full 12-week period (aspirin for 10 weeks and pomegranate for only 8 weeks), I will continue with them for the next quarter too.

Also for this quarter (the whole one this time), I have added daily OPC, fish oil and gone onto a vegetarian diet. In particular, this means no meat or dairy products. However, I'll leave all the details about that for another thread...
Posted 1/25/2011 5:17 AM (GMT -5)
I'm sure you know this..but just in case:

Daily aspirin therapy: Understand the benefits and risks

What happens if you stop taking aspirin every day?
You might be surprised to learn that stopping daily aspirin therapy can have a rebound effect that may increase your risk of heart attack or stroke. If you've been on daily aspirin therapy and want to stop, it's important to talk to your doctor before making any changes. Suddenly stopping daily aspirin therapy could have a rebound effect that may trigger a blood clot.
http://www.mayoclinic.com/health/daily-aspirin-therapy/HB00073

Posted 1/25/2011 5:52 AM (GMT -5)
Thanks Steve. I don't have many of the risk factors, but still will check with my doctor before stopping, just as I did before starting.

Aspirin, according to the studies, takes years to have an effect, and it was wishful thinking on my part to think that it might work for me in a few months sad

I have added my signature to this post, forgot it first time.
Posted 1/25/2011 11:01 AM (GMT -5)
Piano -- you're trying man and i respect that.  please keep us posted.

ed

 

Posted 1/25/2011 11:46 AM (GMT -5)
I think it might be hard to draw any conclusions from your experiment.
Is it not also possible that without the Aspirin and pomegranate that your PSA could have risen from 0.3 to 0.5 say?

It has taken most of us a long time to get where we are (I asssume my PCa had been growing away slowly inside me for years), so it may also take our bodies a long time to come up with a way of doing anything that could help defend against it. (ie a bit like going on a diet - if it took twenty years to put on 50 pounds it will be hard to try and loose those pounds in twenty weeks, so if there was something in our bodies making it easier for the PCa to grow it had been like that for a long time and it could take just as long to adjust the internal chemistry to slow things down.)

Pomegranate isn't going to be a problem, but take care with the aspirin and as suggested get your doc's advice.

Alf
Posted 1/25/2011 1:46 PM (GMT -5)
Piano: If you are drinking POM Wonderful juice from the funny shaped bottles, remember to look carefully at the label. It has a massive amount of sugar in it. Reading some article on cancers in general, I though the advise was to try to starve the body of sugar because it has some negative effect on tumor growth.

One solution is to use the POM concentrate. No added sugar but you will quickly see why they added the sugar. It is bitter as all heck. Just a thought.

Mike S.
Posted 1/25/2011 2:04 PM (GMT -5)
>>One solution is to use the POM concentrate<<

i take the 1000mg pills by POM which have no sugar or calories.

http://www.pompills.com/index.aspx

ed

Posted 1/25/2011 3:08 PM (GMT -5)
I do the pom concentrate also. 400 mgs daily. I agree with Alf, it's impossible to determine the effect of your experiment. You can not know what the rise would have been if you didn't take the pom and asprin. I will be interesting to see if your added measures, diet and suppliments slow things down further. Good luck. BB
Posted 1/25/2011 3:43 PM (GMT -5)
Ed,
The Pomx pill looks interesting.
Do you know if its it as effective in terms of  "goodness" as the drink itself?

Piano, hope you get a drop next test, good luck.

Mike

Posted 1/25/2011 3:56 PM (GMT -5)
Spottydog -- the claim is it is as good.  i get the pill by subscription.  POM sends me a bottle of 90 pills and my visa card is billed i think $29 a month.  so it sure is alot more convenient.  i'm not sure i could gag down pomegranate juice daily for any length of time.

ed

Posted 1/25/2011 4:04 PM (GMT -5)
Ed,I've been swigging the juice for about a year, but it's the local supermarket brand
and quite sweet.
Too much sugar cant be good, think I'll try the pills....

Ta
Mike

PS, they only ship within the US, it's back to the juice for me then:)

Post Edited (spottydog10) : 1/25/2011 2:12:07 PM (GMT-7)

Posted 1/25/2011 9:07 PM (GMT -5)
Piano,

Abiraterone has been proven to decrease PSA and reduce tumors. I realize that the first clinical trials were for hormone refractory patients, but newer trials are underway for patients for which hormone refractory is a long way off. Kind of drastic, but what if you could experiment with this? I read in another post where one might be able to obtain it.

In any event, keep us posted....I hope for low numbers for you regardless.

Jerry L.
Posted 1/26/2011 3:56 PM (GMT -5)
Thanks to all who have replied and a few specific comments:

English Alf and BB_Fan. I agree that ordinarily there's no way to be sure what my PSA would have been without intervention. However, prior to starting these tests, my PSA was on a well established upwards trend with a doubling time of 7 months extending over two years. As I understand it, my doubling would most likely continue at that rate, which gives an expected 0.4 now and 0.6 in another 3 months. So I will take anything less than those figures as reasonable proof that what I have been doing the previous three months has had some effect. On that basis, nothing so far.

Regarding the Pomegranate juice: My particular supermarket brand comes from Turkey (Ersu brand), and it is sweet and syrupy which I like. The label says 100% pomegranate juice (from concentrate), so I have to assume there is no added sugar, and it is just the natural fruit sugar. Each serving has 484KJ which works out to about 120 calories or about 5-10% of my recommended daily, whatever that is. So I can live with the taste and calories, but I agree that the concentrate (pills) is a good choice for those who can't.

Jerry L I'm not sure that Abiraterone will be available in my area, but will certainly ask my uro on my next visit. If not, I may be a candidate for some other trial, even if it only turns out to be in the placebo arm. :-)
Posted 1/26/2011 5:09 PM (GMT -5)
Hi Piano, In your first posting in this thread, you said you had previously discussed your own “experiment”…sorry that I might have missed your earlier discussion, but your Subject line for this one caught my eye... Maybe you addressed some of the background in your earlier discussion, but your combination of aspirin and pomegranate juice seems, well…random. In this thread, you mentioned that you are now looking at tweaking your plan to include diet/nutritional changes.   Might I suggest, for your consideration, aligning yourself a little closer to the approach of lifestyle changes which were studied in a fairly recent scientific program.   Three categories of lifestyle change were made:   i) diet/nutrition, ii) exercise, and (not "or") iii) stress reduction. Perhaps you’ve seen me post about this scientific study previously (I have several times in various threads; perhaps you're sick of seeing me post about this study), but if you haven’t, and for any newcomers or others who might be interested in reviewing, I’ll briefly summarize. The study was conducted at the Univ of California at San Francisco under the direction of Dr Pete Carroll, with Dr Dean Ornish.   A key difference in the patients in this study and you is that you have already had one major treatment mode (surgery), whereas all men in the study had been diagnosed with PC (biopsy confirmed) but had not (yet) undergone any aggressive treatment. The “control group” made no lifestyle modifications, and after one year, their PSAs progressed (increased, unfavorably) similar to how the general population might be expected to progress without doing anything different. In the “experimental group” (both groups consisted of about 100 men, with about the same average case characteristics), the men made the lifestyle modifications I indicated, above.   After one year, their PSA actually decreased (favorably). For more info, here’s an easy-to-read ARTICLE , or here’s the study’s REPORT . So, it appears from this thread that you are willing to “dabble” with lifestyle changes…why not think about jumping in with both feet?   Now might be the time. Two key points to keep in mind:   (1) the summary from the report that said there was “ a direct correlation between the degree of lifestyle change and the changes in PSA ”, and (2) the duration of the study was one year.   While I truly, truly applaud (and support) your beginning efforts to take control of things within your control to drive down PSA, d abbling in 3-month increments is unlikely to lead to an evidence-based conclusion. best wishes... Post Edited (Casey59) : 1/26/2011 4:00:19 PM (GMT-7)
Posted 1/26/2011 6:20 PM (GMT -5)
Perhaps Piano is doing it exactly the way he wants. Everyone should be ok with that decision, I hope.
Posted 1/27/2011 4:48 AM (GMT -5)
Purgatory, you have it right -- I am doing it the way I want. However I am always open to suggestions on how to do it better.

Casey, I have seen your lifestyle posts and I don't argue with the recommendations. In recent years I have gotten adequate exercise, and led a low-stress lifestyle. I don't think I can improve greatly on what I am already doing. And it was while on adequate exercise and low-stress, I got both colon cancer and PCa in the first place sad

My deficiency has been in the area of diet. With a BMI of 20, I have never been overweight. But I have definitely been a red meat and animal fat guy with too much liking for cake and sweets, and not enough for "rabbit food".

I see diet implicated in all sorts of cancer everywhere I look, -- including your posts. I can take a hint -- at last.

So diet is the main area I am now working on -- and boosting the exercise too -- have gotten a bit slack over recent months after moving house. Along the way, if some supplement looks promising, I'll try that too. But I draw the line at coffee enemas -- I prefer my (limited) coffee from the other end. :-)
Posted 1/27/2011 5:14 AM (GMT -5)

Hello All...    remember my uro being involved in a clinical trial  ( I was not in it):

Pomegranate Extract in Treating Patients With Rising Prostate-Specific Antigen Levels After Surgery or Radiation Therapy for Localized Prostate Cancer

http://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT00336934

http://www.cancer.gov/clinicaltrials/ft-UCLA-0507059-01

Article said...

In this trial, researchers are exploring the potential of pomegranate juice to slow or reverse increasing PSA levels in men who have undergone treatment for localized prostate cancer. Pomegranate juice is rich in phytochemicals, substances that have been shown in laboratory studies to inhibit cancer growth and spread. Men in this trial will be randomly assigned to drink a special preparation of pomegranate juice or a placebo drink daily for up to one year. "In a phase II trial we conducted, daily consumption of pomegranate juice resulted in a significant lengthening of PSA doubling time and disease stabilization," said Dr. Pantuck. "We hope to verify those results in a phase III, double-blinded, placebo-controlled study."

 

Do not know what the lastest updates are, but I will drop him a note and check up on it. I started taking pomegranate extract capsules after my SRT treatment.   Also drink Bluesky pomegranate/ginseng soda...  Maybe a little late...   lol...   I get the capsules from Swanson and they were fairly cheap. Will check the dose and price I am paying there  when I find the invoice. I also take the low dose aspirin as directed by my family doctor for my heart "health" as both mother and father had heart problems. Thankfully I do not show any heart issues to date.

God Bless!  pasayten

Posted 1/27/2011 12:31 PM (GMT -5)

Piano said...

I see diet implicated in all sorts of cancer everywhere I look, -- including your posts. I can take a hint -- at last.
So diet is the main area I am now working on -- and boosting the exercise too...

Piano, good for you for attacking all 3 of the "big three" (diet/nutrition, exercise, and stress reduction) to try to restrict your PC progression.  No telling how much worst things would be/would have been without these efforts.

Pomegranate appears to be a good step, but I'm glad to hear that you are now jumping-in more fully and taking the additional steps in the area of diet/nutrition..."at last."  wink

best wishes...

Posted 1/27/2011 1:46 PM (GMT -5)
Piano,
what I don't understand is that nobody here ever tried something from dr. Leibowitz's protocol which he has been using for more than 10 years (see his reports of the Compassionate Oncology Medical Group, L.A.).
Anti-angiogenics such as thalidomide and lenalidomide turn off the blood supply to cancer cells and also enhance the immune system. He uses them together, but in the lowest possible doses: 50 mg thalidomide the first 2 evenings and then, the 3rd day, 5 mg lenalidomide. These are cheap as made by India's pharmaceutical industry (30 capsules Thaloda-50 are INR 308.70, and 30 Lenalid-5 are 4386 INR). Unfortunately much more expensive than the sticker price when bought via the internet without presciption. Lenalidomide is even more expensive when it has the brand name Revlimid on it.
Leibowitz's argument is that it should not just be to the benefit of patients with multiple myeloma, but those with prostate cancer as well (so-called 'off-label' use).
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