The answer to that question is that your sitemaster has no idea. However, here is what he can tell you.
At this year’s upcoming annual meeting of the American Urological Association (AUA) there are > 1,000 presentations listed in the abstracts that have something to do with prostate cancer.
If you were to go to this one meeting with the intent of attending every prostate cancer session and looking at every prostate cancer-related poster, and you were to assume that it would take a minimum of 5 minutes to give sufficient attention to every presentation and poster to actually understand it, this would require a total of 83 hours (even though the meeting only lasts for five 12-hour days). This would assume you did nothing else at all while you were in San Francisco. And of course a lot of the oral presentations last for a good deal longer than 5 minutes per presentation.
Conclusion: There is no way any longer that even the most dedicated individual can “keep up” with all of the ongoing research. After all, most of the studies presented at the annual meeting of the AUA relate exclusively to the diagnosis and treatment of relatively early stage forms of prostate cancer. The majority of studies related to the management of metastatic prostate cancer now get presented at Genitourinary Cancers Symposium (early in the year) and the annual meeting of the American Society for Clinical Oncology (ASCO; in June this year) — but that’s just in America, and it doesn’t include all the basic science research that gets presented at meetings like the annual meeting of the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR).
Your sitemaster has been doing this for long enough that he can remember a time when it was actually still possible to go the the AUA annual meeting and get around every single poster session and oral session with reasonable ease! Those days are long gone!
So when your urologist has never heard of the exciting abstract you found on line this morning about prostate cancer topic Y, you shouldn’t really be too surprised. After all, he (or she) has to spend most of his (or her) days actually meeting with patients, carrying out diagnostic examinations, doing surgical and other procedures, and filling out pieces of paper for insurance companies so that you (and others) can actually get the treatment(s) you need. It doesn’t leave a lot of time for “keeping up” with the increasingly enormous amount of prostate cancer literature!
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Dear Sitemaster. I just read that from your last post,
“After all, he (or she) has to spend most of his (or her) days actually meeting with patients, carrying out diagnostic examinations, doing surgical and other procedures, and filling out pieces of paper for insurance companies so that you (and others) can actually get the treatment(s) you need. It doesn’t leave a lot of time for “keeping up” with the increasingly enormous amount of prostate cancer literature!”
I find that a poor statement.
They are actually dealing with the life of half the men on Earth. They should get organised to be on top of what they have to know.
Other then that, let me tell you I read all your posts with a lot of interest and thank you very much for such a professionalism. Of course, I am one of them being touch by this calamity.
Once again, thanks for your dedication,
Claude Drainville
As of this morning, a search of clinicaltrials.gov with the term “prostate cancer” shows 3,940 results, 881 of which were currently recruiting, and 121 registered but not yet recruiting. The are also 442 “Active — no longer recruiting”. Good luck figuring out which one you might qualify for. The inclusion/exclusion criteria is something most patients and many clinicians do not fully comprehend.
How much prostate cancer research is going on today? Probably a lot less then breast cancer research!