Leeanglo sounds strange about the spinal type issues you say you are experiencing. You could call Patient Advocates on Advanced Prostate Cancer (PAACT) and talk to them free and mention your senario...they may have some asap advice: (Michigan) 616-453-1477 Rick Profitt likely to answer. They have decades of experience in various patients using all types of flutamides and casodex, likely seen plenty of cases.
If you can find a psa testing facility nearby I would get tested pretty soon and see if it helps at all and that would be a clue, especially when using HD casodex at 150 mg level. I question how useful is it and is it doing harm??? Because of your overall stats and other variables, mono therapy for someone else in a different scenario could be much different and/or work fine, so that people don't get the wrong impression. PCa can morph and/or have androgen independence and be tricky on the receptors as to what happens on a cellular level. This is why the drugs, timing and useage is very strange, some patients fail psa on casodex perhaps even early on, but later in their PCa journey cycle sometimes can revist it and get a new response....it is that strange. Protocols are tricky and that is why the specialist rule in knowing the biology of PCa, Dr. Myers, Strum, Scholz, Lam, Leibowitz, Volgezang, Yu and some others are the best in this.
Casodex is normally not associated with any type of flaring, just the opposite. It does have possible back pain, but spinal is little different. One website mentioned this:
Musculoskeletal
Musculoskeletal complaints include bone pain. This may be due to underlying disease.
So if it were in effect doing harm for PCa, then I suppose the spinal pain would be a possible clue and might even get more painful, maybe. Like I said I don't presume to know, only to question.
Best to you.
(suggested reading:
www.hrpca.org proven treatments)
Post Edited (zufus) : 2/10/2011 2:49:08 PM (GMT-7)