Center for disease prevention and control recommends the following:

Should you get screened for prostate cancer?

The answer is different for each man. If you are thinking about being screened, learn about the possible benefits and harms of screening, diagnosis, and treatment, and talk to your doctor about your personal risk factors.

What Is Prostate Cancer Screening?

Cancer screening means looking for cancer before it causes symptoms. The goal of screening for prostate cancer is to find cancer early that may spread if not treated.

There is no standard test to screen for prostate cancer. Two tests that are commonly used to screen for prostate cancer are—

• A blood test called a prostate specific antigen (PSA) test. PSA is a substance your prostate makes. This test measures the level of PSA in your blood. Your PSA level may be high if you have prostate cancer and for many other reasons, such as having an enlarged prostate, a prostate infection, or taking certain medicines.
• Digital rectal examination, when a health care provider inserts a gloved, lubricated finger into a man’s rectum to feel the prostate for anything abnormal, such as cancer.

Screening may find cancer that is likely to spread to other places in the body, so it can be treated before it spreads. This may lower the chance of death from prostate cancer in some men.

But most prostate cancers grow slowly and don’t cause any health problems. If a screening test finds a slow-growing cancer, it may cause you to worry, and lead to unneeded tests and treatments that can have serious side effects.

Also, a PSA test can be abnormal, but you don’t have prostate cancer. This is called a false positive result. A false positive PSA test result often leads to more unnecessary tests.

The only way to know if an abnormal test is due to cancer is to do a biopsy. A biopsy is when a small piece of tissue is removed from the prostate and looked at under a microscope to check for cancer. A prostate biopsy can cause pain, blood in the semen or ejaculate, and infection.

The most common treatments for localized (early-stage) prostate cancer are surgery to remove the prostate, radiation therapy, and active surveillance (getting tested regularly, and treating the cancer only if it grows or causes symptoms). Side effects from radiation therapy or surgery may include—

• Impotence.
• Loss of bladder control.
• Bowel problems.

Talk to Your Doctor

If you are thinking about being screened, you and your doctor should consider—

• If you have an increased risk of getting prostate cancer.
• If you have any health problems that may make it harder for you to be treated for prostate cancer if it is found, or that may make you less likely to benefit from screening.
• How you feel about the possible benefits and harms of screening, diagnosis, and treatment.

“Get Moving: Exercise and Physical Activity In fact, exercise and physical activity are considered a cornerstone of almost every healthy aging program.”

“”The liver is an important digestive organ because it produces bile. Bile is a yellowish-green fluid that aids in the emulsification of fats. The gallbladder can be thought of as a storage sac that helps the liver. It is defined as a small sac-shaped organ that stores and concentrates bile. The liver and gallbladder each have their own ducts that lead directly from the organs. However, there is a common duct that carries bile from the liver and the gallbladder to the duodenum- part of the small intestines, known as the common bile duct.:”

National Diabetes, Digestive and Kidney Disease

“A stent is a small mesh tube made of either stainless steel or cobalt chromium alloys that is placed by a catheter into a narrowed (blocked) coronary artery. Stents can be used for narrowing of tubes elsewhere like the small intestines and other areas of the body. The stent helps enlarge a segment of the artery or intestines to improve blood flow, which should reduce or eliminate symptoms of chest pain when the stent is used in a artery or allow food in the intestines to go through better digestion from starting in the stomach.  This allows the patient to eat food better.”

A stent is a wire mesh tube that is used to help hold open an artery. To simple understanding this concept think of a plumber or a mechanic. With a plumber sometimes they have to replace a certain area of a pipe that connects the water or like a mechanic replacing a certain area of piping (like the muffler piping connected infront of the muffler than can either can be replaced or just welded with piece of piping welded just to save money. Well a stent opens the artery that was clogged and its put in that place to reinforce that area of the artery to remain open to allow blood to get to that heart from that coronary artery and it will stay there life to keep the artery permanently patent to prevent the blockage from happening again with the synthetic mesh piece.

Stent can also be used for a blocked duodenum (Part of the small intestines). If the pancreatic cancer is blocking the duodenum (first part of the small intestine), you may have a stent put in to keep the duodenum open. It should stop you being sick and you should start to feel like eating again.

Description

Stents are used to hold open diseased coronary arteries (these arteries supply blood to the heart), as well as diseased arteries of the peripheral vascular system (PVS). Peripheral means away from the heart the PVS is the arteries that supply blood to the rest of the body (again away from the heart all the way down to the hands and feet).

There are variety of stents currently available.

For a surgeon to find out if you even need one, first usually a angiogram is performed and this is a catheter simply from the femerol artery or from your arm to the coronary arteries. If the MD sees you show a blockage 80% or more an angioplasty is performed which is a balloon at the end of this catheter that blows up and decompresses to give the effect like punching gloves. The balloon inflates and deflates over and over again till the blockage breaks open free and then a stent is put in that area to help keep it open permanently (patent).

Some stents have been compressed onto the outside of an angioplasty balloon catheter and delivered by inflating the balloon in the desired location. Other stents are “self- expanding” spring-loaded devices, which expand automatically upon deployment.

Stents remain in arteries permanently. The tissue lining the arteries actually grows over the metal mesh to cover the inner lumen of the stent.

Stent procedures have become very common like tonsillectomies were in childhood. Stents are sometimes used as an alternative to coronary artery bypass surgery, if the patient is a candidate. Stents are often used in combination with balloon angioplasty. One leads to the other depending on what the angioplasty displays for the surgeon on the T.V. in when they are doing the procedure and if the come up to a blockage high enough to perform the angioplasty followed with a stent it will be done.

Learn more about stents this weekend in PART 2.

“Most types of dementia can’t be cured, but there are ways to manage your symptoms.”

MAYO CLINIC

“Lewy body dementia (LBD) is a progressive brain disease and the second leading cause of degenerative dementia in the elderly.  Unfortunately, currently, a conclusive diagnosis of LBD can be obtained only from a postmortem autopsy for which arrangements should be made in advance.  Currently, a conclusive diagnosis of LBD can be obtained only from a postmortem autopsy for which arrangements should be made in advance.”

The Wien Center – Mount Sinai Medical Center

“Diseases such as Alzheimer’s disease cause nerve cells to die, damaging the structure and chemistry of the brain.

After the symptoms of dementia with Lewy bodies begin, people live on average for six to twelve years. However, each person will experience dementia with Lewy bodies differently.”

Alzheimer’s Society

“In leukemia, the cancerous cells are discovered circulating in the blood and bone marrow, while in lymphoma, the cells tend to aggregate and form masses, or tumors, in lymphatic tissues. Myeloma is a tumor of the bone marrow, and involves a specific subset of white blood cells that produce a distinctive protein.”.