BACKGROUND Patients seek herbal/hormonal dietary supplements (HHDS) to prevent and/or solve health and aging issues. After two men developed an unusual course of clinically aggressive prostate cancer within months of starting daily consumption of the same HHDS product, we investigated the effect of this product on prostate cancer progression. METHODS We evaluated serum levels of total testost...

Androgen receptor plays a critical role in the development of primary as well as advanced hormone-refractory prostate cancer. Therefore, ablation of androgen receptor from prostate cancer cells is an interesting concept for developing a new therapy not only for androgen-dependent prostate cancer but also for metastatic hormone-refractory prostate cancer, for which there is no effective treatmen...

Introduction: Androgen deprivation therapy (ADT) with androgen receptor axis-targeted (ARAT) is the standard of care provided to patients metastatic prostate cancer. While effective, it results in sequelae, such as loss skeletal muscle mass. In this study, we compared sarcopenic effects abiraterone and enzalutamide, two ARATs used treat Methods: Our cohort comprised 55 diagnosed hormone-naive c...

We previously showed that targeted expression of non-receptor tyrosine kinase Etk/BMX in mouse prostate induces prostate intraepithelial neoplasia, implying a possible causal role of Etk in prostate cancer development and progression. Here, we report that Etk is upregulated in both human and mouse prostates in response to androgen ablation. Etk expression seems to be differentially regulated by...

As men get older, there is a decline in functioning of many biological systems; the endocrine systems share such changes in hormone levels. Ageing in men is accompanied by progressive, but individually variable decline in serum testosterone production in healthy men especially in men over 60 years of age. Androgens determine the differentiation of male internal and external genitalia as well as...

Autoregulation is a control mechanism common to several proteins of the steroid/thyroid hormone receptor superfamily. In this work, the effect of androgens and antiandrogens on the expression of the human androgen receptor (hAR) in prostate and breast cancer cell lines was studied. Northern blot analysis revealed a decrease in hAR steady state RNA levels in LNCaP cells by 3.3 nM of the syntheti...

Cancers of the prostate are categorized as follows: 1)hormone-naive (never having previously received hormone manipulation); 2)androgen-dependent (having received hormonal manipulation but a less than continuous application, i.e., intermittent androgen blockade or with an agent that does not produce a castrate testosterone level, i.e., antiandrogen); 3)androgen independent (progressive disease ...

BACKGROUND: Steroid hormone receptors (SHRs) are members of the superfamily of ligand-activated transcription factors that regulate many biological processes. Co-regulators act as bridging molecules between the SHR and general transcription factors to enhance transactivation of target genes. Previous studies demonstrated that Stat3 is constitutively activated in prostate cancer and can enhance ...

Androgens and the androgen receptor (AR) are indispensable for expression of the male phenotype. The two most important androgens are testosterone and 5α-dihydrotestosterone. The elucidation of the mechanism of androgen action has a long history starting in the 19th century with the classical experiments by Brown-Séquard. In the 1960s the steroid hormone receptor concept was established and the...

Although monoclonal in origin, mammary tumors acquire a marked heterogeneity of cell phenotypes, including a mixture of steroid hormone-sensitive cells and insensitive cells. We describe here long-term studies on the effects of androgen withdrawal on cloned androgen-responsive S115 mouse mammary tumor cells as a model system to investigate mechanisms by which tumor cells lose their steroid sens...