The modification of the androgen axis plays a central role in men’s health, from maintaining vitality to controlling prostate cancer. Trying to balance the side effects and benefits of altering this axis is a fertile area of research.

Read More

Mark A. Preston, MD, MPH, a urologic surgeon in the Division of Urology at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, is co-lead author of a study focused on improving prostate cancer (PCa) screening for African American men. The results were recently published in European Urology.
Read More

Investigators in the Center for Surgery and Public Health (CSPH) at Brigham and Women’s Hospital (BWH) – in conjunction with colleagues from Stanford University Medical Center – compared the use, outcomes and costs between robotic-assisted and laparoscopic approaches, two common minimally surgical techniques, for radical nephrectomy. They studied surgeries in 23,753 patients across hundreds of US hospitals between 2003 and 2015.
Read More

Studies have consistently demonstrated that conventionally-fractionated high dose external beam radiation therapy, consisting of daily treatment for two months, decreases prostate cancer recurrence and improves metastasis-free survival. Previous studies also demonstrate that moderate hypo-fractionated radiation therapy, consisting of daily treatment for one month using a larger dose per treatment, provides a similar low risk of recurrence. The risk may even be lower with hypo-fractionated radiation therapy than conventionally fractionated high dose external beam radiation therapy. Read More

Recent research led by Brigham and Women’s Hospital suggests that the likelihood of a patient getting prostate-specific antigen (PSA) testing for the early detection of prostate cancer depends on the type of physician he sees.

In October 2011, the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force (USPSTF) issued a recommendation against the use of PSA testing for prostate cancer screening for all men. In its assessment, the task force concluded that, overall, the harms of PSA testing outweigh its benefits. The study authors, however, hypothesized that adoption of the USPSTF recommendation would vary according to a physician’s specialty. Read More

Researchers at Brigham and Women’s Hospital (BWH) and Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) have developed a home-based diagnostic test that can be used to measure semen quality using a smartphone-based device. The analyzer can identify abnormal semen samples based on sperm concentration and motility criteria with approximately 98 percent accuracy. These findings were published online on March 22, 2017 in Science Translational Medicine.   Read More