I need to put something in front of you that cuts across things I have said in this community more than once. I have told you an enlarged prostate is not an emergency. I have told you not to let anyone rush you into an operation. I have told you the menu of options is longer than most men are shown. I stand behind every bit of that. But I read a review over the last day that makes the other half of the argument, and it would be dishonest of me to sit on it just because it is less comforting. The argument goes like this. We all talk about the prostate. The prostate is not the organ taking the damage. The bladder may be. Your bladder is a muscle. If the outlet is narrowed, that muscle spends years pushing harder than it was built to push. The authors make one point that stopped me: you can transplant a heart. You cannot transplant a bladder. A man whose bladder has given out entirely is looking at catheters for the rest of his life. They lay out five stages in the plainest words I have seen in a journal, taken from what men actually report. One. Things slow down. An annoyance. Two. Up in the night, urgency, always needing to know where the toilet is. Anxiety and exhaustion. Three. Leaking. The smell and the stains. Embarrassment. Four. Suddenly you cannot go at all. Terror. Five. The bladder stops working. Their word for it is anguish. Their case is that somewhere in the early stages there is a window where dealing with the blockage still protects that muscle, and that we do not currently have any reliable way of telling when a man is slipping past it. Now I am going to be straight with you about how much weight this can carry, because I would rather you trusted me than agreed with me. This is a proposal. The authors call it hypothesis-generating. Their staging system has never been validated, has no cut-offs, and they describe it themselves as a way of talking to patients rather than a diagnosis. There is also a figure in the paper that contradicts itself between the table and the text, which is why I am not quoting percentages at you from it.

This one is close to home, so I will say the awkward part first. I have carried more weight than I should have. I am still working my way down towards where I want to be. So nothing below is me standing on a chair telling anybody what to do with their body. I was happily overweight for a long time, and I am still overweight according to the charts. I was headed to type II diabetes before I turned things around. A study came out at the end of August looking at insulin resistance and enlarged prostate. Insulin resistance just means the body has got worse at handling sugar. It usually goes along with weight carried around the middle. They used two big national health surveys. One in China with about 4,400 men, one in the United States with about 3,500. In both, the men whose bodies handled sugar worse were more likely to have an enlarged prostate. Same direction, both countries, which is the bit that makes me sit up. Let me be straight about what that is and is not. It is not proof that one causes the other. It is an observational study. It can see two things standing next to each other. It cannot tell you which one pushed. It is not a cure either. Nobody has ever shrunk a prostate with a salad. But most of what happens to the prostate is out of our hands. We do not pick our fathers, and the gland does not stop growing. So a place where the thing that is good for the heart might also be doing something here is worth a look, even if it turns out to be very little. I am not a doctor and I am not going to pretend I know how much difference it makes. But, I do know that there are better food choices for the prostate and choices that are not so good. I try to incorporate as many of the good choices as I can these days. Just saying. Question for the room, and answer it honestly or not at all. Has anyone here noticed their night-time trips change at all when their weight or their general fitness changed? I would genuinely like to know, because I have wondered about my own.

Please give a warm welcome to Sophie Katie to the prostate Paladin community. Sophie is interested in Good vibes, real conversations and endless curiosity. @sophie-katie We are glad you are here.Please dive in and begin your prostate awareness journey.

Researchers at Umeå University, Sweeden, and international collaborators have developed a promising fully human antibody against agressive prostate cancer in preclinical testing. So, yes this is not available yet, but it shows promise against slowing the cancer when it is ready to jump from the prostate to the rest of the body. Most men who have prostate cancer can watch and wait - it is one of the slowest growing cancers and has a 98% success rate of cure for 10 years or more; when caught before spreading outside the prostate. That is the dangerous step, once it spreads to the lymph nodes or bones, things become much more difficult. This antibody (published in 'Signal Transduction and Targeted Therapy') was able to slow tumor growth and block metastasis (process where cancer spreads to other parts of the body), in preclinical studies of agressive prostate cancer. Maréne Landström, Professor of Pathology at the Department of Medical Biosciences, Umeå University, who led the study; say they have been able to identify the mechanisms that drive cancer cell growth, invasiveness and metastatic spread. "Agressive Prostate Cancer needs more options for treatment." Most prostate cancers are slow growing and men will die of old age or something else before it becomes a problem. But, in those rare case where the cancer is aggressive, new treatments are needed, and this antibody shows promise. Landström and colleagues led the development of a fully human antibody (made entirely from human proteins). This makes the antibody more suitable for people. In preclinical trials, the antibody stopped both tumor growth and metastic spread of an agressive form of prostate cancer. The treatment attacks the cancer through a biological route, that differs from existing treatments, it is a new mechanism. The researchers believe this will lead to reduced side effects. The antibody behaved as intended in the models tested, which is important in moving forward towards clinical use.

I read a small local story this week that I keep thinking about. Because it highlights that men are not alone in this struggle. A man called Carlos Allen in Louisiana rang the bell at his cancer center last week. Three years ago he was told he had prostate cancer. Now he is cancer free, and when he rang that bell his whole family was standing around him. What he said was the bit that got me. He said it showed him how a family comes together in the good times and the bad. Sixteen years ago a friend in an airport lounge told me something about my own body that I did not want to hear. That one awkward moment changed a lot for me. That was the beginning of what is now Prostate Paladin. Carlos had a whole family in the room. Some men do not have one person. So here is my question for you today. Who is in your room? And whose room are you standing in? If there is a man in your life you have been meaning to nudge, this is your reminder. And if you are the man - tell someone. You do not have to carry it quietly. Tell me one person you are going to talk to this week. Put their name (or just "my dad", "my husband") in the comments. That is all. https://www.skool.com/prostate-paladin-4886/about