Hi everyone and welcome to my uPlej profile page.  I am married to Catherine McArthur and we have 8 children (5 sons and 3 daughters) and 22 grandchildren. I am retired and spend lots of time serving in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and traveling visiting all of the family.  I would like to ask you to simply join my network.  By doing so you’ll pick a charity and at the same time you’ll be supporting my favorite charity.

Five years ago my doctor told me that I had prostate cancer.  I was in a state of shock since I received regular annual check- ups from my doctor.  My doctor discovered that my PSA was increasing past 4.0 so I was sent to an urologist for further testing.  The doctor arranged for a biopsy.  After a few days the results indicated that I had prostate cancer and was told to return for an evaluation and learn what options I had to remove the cancer. 

My son Brian called me and said that he had several patients who were treated by Dr. William Catalona, one of the top specialists in the country, for this type of cancer. Dr. Catalona has performed more than 4500 operations and is one of the most requested surgeons in the country.  He has patients that fly in from around the world to seek care under his hands.

At the encouragement of Brian, I chose Dr. Catalona.  Dr. Catalona said, “It really is rewarding, every day I usually see two new patients. This week, I’ve had a week of young men—two men in their early 40’s and two in their late 40’s. They were going about their business when they found out they had prostate cancer and now their world has been turned upside down. In the vast majority of cases, we’ll cure them. As they get older, they don’t want to have their sons and grandsons go through the same thing.  Prostate cancer now kills almost 30,000 men in the United States every year, and nobody says very much about it. I often say that if 30,000 men were killed in a political conflict, the effect would be much more palpable to society and there would be a strong public outcry to stop it. In medical research, we are working together quietly—each contributing his or her individual talents and training—to try to end the unnecessary suffering and death from prostate cancer.”  Dr. Catalona said, “I believed the PSA test would be better than anything we had. I was kind of howled down: they said everyone knew that PSA was far too imperfect to be used as a screening test.”

But a screening test for asymptomatic men was needed. Dr. Catalona said “Because of the insidious nature of prostate cancer, you have to be proactive about looking for it if you want to detect it in a curable stage.  When I returned home from the meeting, I was determined to initiate a PSA-based prostate cancer screening study to test my hypothesis. I started my study in 1989. I ultimately enrolled 36,000 men, and it ran for 12 years. By 1991, after enrolling the first 1,600 men in the study and analyzing the preliminary data, I wrote an article for the New England Journal of Medicine, showing PSA could be used as a first-line screening test for prostate cancer” (Catalona WJ, et al., "Measurement of prostate specific antigen in serum as a screening test for prostate cancer," NEJM 324:1156-61, 1991 [published erratum, N Engl J Med 325:1324, 1991]). This paper received a lot of media coverage and really launched widespread PSA testing in the US and around the world.

Dr. William J. Catalona works at Northwestern Memorial Hospital in Chicago, IL and he is also the Medical Director of the Urological Research Foundation. Dr. Catalona is well known throughout the world in the medical community.  It has been five years since Dr. Catalona  performed my surgery and I am doing fine, my PSA is almost non-detectable.  I will be monitored for another five years on an annual basis.

 There is evidence of father-to-son transmission according to Bill Isaac of the John Hopkins–Brady Urological Institute.  It is strongly recommended that men begin to check their PSA in their early forties.