Former heavyweight boxing champ Leon Spinks — who famously defeated Muhammad Ali in 1978 — was diagnosed with prostate cancer last May, and the cancer has since spread to his bladder, according to his family.
Spinks’ wife, Brenda, told USA Today that her 66-year-old husband had been hospitalized for several months, but has since returned to their home in Henderson, Nev,, and will continue treatment on an outpatient basis.
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African American Men More Likely to Develop Prostate Cancer
As an African American, Spinks had a significantly higher risk of developing prostate cancer than other men. Dr. Edwin Posadas, a urologic oncologist at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, told SurvivorNet that prostate cancer affects men of different ethnicities differently. For example, African American and Latino men are significantly more likely to develop prostate cancer than white or Asian men, and this affects the age and frequency that men should be screened for the disease, Dr. Posadas said.RELATED: When Should I Start Screening for Prostate Cancer?
Spinks’ wife did not disclose what type of treatment her husband was undergoing for his advanced disease, but there are several options for prostate cancer that has spread to other organs — as the boxer’s has.
What are the Options for Advanced Prostate Cancer?
Hormonal Therapy
A standard treatment for men with metastatic prostate cancer — or disease that has spread — is hormonal therapy, Dr. Stephen Freedland, director of the Center for Integrated Research in Cancer and Lifestyle at Cedars-Sinai, told SurvivorNet in a past interview.
“Usually for men with tumors that spread, hormonal therapy is used as the first-line that we do,” Dr. Freedland said. “More importantly, it’s the backbone upon which we build. We typically won’t say, ‘Let’s forget hormones, let’s go straight to chemotherapy.’ What we do know is actually putting the two together is certainly better for men with tumors that have spread to the bone and different areas.”
Hormonal therapy does comes with some pretty serious side effects. It can cause a male menopause of sorts with hot flashes, osteoporosis and weight gain — and lead to a significantly higher risk of diabetes. Still, Dr. Freedland pointed out that the degree to which this type of therapy shrinks tumors is much better than chemotherapy. Hormonal therapy — also know as androgen deprivation therapy — reduces the levels of testosterone which can stimulate prostate cells to grow.
“If we take away testosterone we can shrink down the tumor and hold it in check for often years and years and years,” Dr. Freedland said.
Radiation
Radiation may also be an option for some men with advanced prostate cancer, as this mode of treatment has become much more successful at treating men with this disease in the past few decades.
“The reason that we've become more successful in treating prostate cancer over the last 30 years with radiation is because we've been able to get a higher dose in the prostate,” Dr. Patrick Swift, clinical professor of Radiation Oncology at Stanford Health, told SurvivorNet in a previous interview.
Dr. Swift explained that “dose escalation” has allowed doctors to get a higher-dose of radiation into the affected area. The risk with this, however, is that increasing the dose increases the risk of radiation damaging nearby organs.
He added that as technology gets better, doctors have been making use of something called Image-Guided Intensity-Modulated Radiation Therapy (IMRT). IMRT allows doctors to get the needed dose of radiation to the affected areas, with minimal damage to other organs that may be in the way.
“The modulation is like painting the area that we want to get the high dose of radiation into, but really minimizing the dose of radiation to the nearby critical structures,” Dr. Swift said.
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