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June 2007 Volume 1 #1
 Zometa helps with bone pain HIFU: A new treatment for PCa On your team against PCa CPCN welcomes new directors |
Zometa helps with bone pain by John Hoffman  About a year ago, things were not going well for Terry Bubbs. The 59-year-old from Winnipeg, Manitoba was having various bone problems related to metastatic prostate cancer: pain, lightheadedness, and what he refers to as a general wobbliness. “If sat and watched a movie for a couple of hours, when I’d get up from my chair, I’d often fall because of a sudden weakness in my legs,” Terry explains. His doctor said these symptoms were due to spinal cord compression, a complication experienced by some prostate cancer patients with bone metastases. At the time Terry Bubbs was experiencing these symptoms, he was taking Aredia, a drug often given to breast cancer patients with bone metastases. However, it was doing very little. So when Terry was offered the chance to attend the annual meetings of the Canadian Urological Association (CUA), he and his wife were eager to go -- to see if they could learn anything that might improve Terry’s outlook. That trip to Halifax was more fruitful than they could have imagined. Not only did it lead to treatment with Zometa (zoledronic acid), a drug that relieved some of his symptoms, it set off a chain of events that would lead to this medication becoming funded and available to Manitoba men with bone metastatic prostate cancer. Rather than fight the cancer directly, Zometa helps keep bones strong and less vulnerable to the effects of cancer, resulting in less pain and fewer fractures and other skeletal-related events such as spinal cord compression. While at the CAU meetings, Terry’s wife, Anne, happened to sit beside Joe Applebaum, past president of the Montreal West Island Prostate Cancer Support Group who, as people often do at these get togethers, asked what Terry’s story was. After Joe heard about Terry’s situation, he spoke to Montreal urologist Fred Saad, who said, “He might as well be taking a placebo for all the good it will do him. He should be taking Zometa.” The next morning, Terry and Anne visited the booth of Novartis, the manufacturer of Zometa, looking for more information. That’s where they met Eric Lefrancois, a Novartis rep from Montreal. Lefrancois gave them information, but he knew it would not be easy for Terry to get Zometa. “At that time, Zometa was funded for prostate cancer treatment only in Ontario and Quebec,” he explains. “However, if patients and physicians really want to use a drug and live in a province where that particular drug is not funded, our company has a program in place to assist them.” Eventually, Novartis was able to arrange for Zometa to be shipped to Terry’s local pharmacy, so he could receive it through intravenous infusion at his cancer clinic. “But the nurses at the clinic said they couldn’t do the infusion because it wasn’t on the formulary (list of approved drugs for treatment of various cancers),” Terry explains. It’s easy to imagine how frustrating it would be to have a potentially helpful drug in your hands, but not have a way to get it into your body. Happily, arrangements were made for Terry to travel to Lake of the Woods Hospital in Kenora, Ontario, where the drug was funded. The effect of treatment was dramatic. “Right away I felt better,” Bubbs says. “I had less pain, and less tremblies. Even my doctor noticed. He ran his hand up and down my spine and said, ‘The lumps and bumps are gone.’” Why would Canadians have to travel to another province to access treatment?
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