Eating, Activity, and Stress Education (EASE)

The purpose of this study is to determine whether a vegetable-based diet, physical activity program, and stress reduction training will reduce or maintain PSA levels, an indicator of prostate cancer progression, in men who have had their prostate gland removed following a prostate cancer diagnosis.

Following surgery or radiation of a primary early-stage prostate cancer (PrCA), one in three patients will experience an elevation in serum prostate antigen (PSA) within 10 years. For men whose primary treatment was prostatectomy, a PSA rise virtually always signals the spread of PrCA. After such evidence of recurrence, the "standard" treatment is medical or surgical castration. Castration results in reducing the PSA about 85% of the time, but it makes no difference whether such treatment occurs before or after the appearance of clinical symptoms of recurrence. This time interval between the first rise in PSA and symptom appearance may be many years. The most salient fact, however, is that castration does not prolong men's lives and it is not certain whether it even meaningfully delays symptom appearance in men who receive the treatment at the first sign of biochemical recurrence. Castration also has significant side effects including osteoporosis (bone loss), decreased muscle mass, impotence, and urinary incontinence. Because PrCA is usually a disease of older men, many will succumb to other diseases before they ever develop a symptom related to metastatic PrCA. For this large fraction of men, a treatment with deleterious affects on quality of life and no clear overall survival benefit may not be a good choice. The protocol the investigators propose will be performed instead of medical or surgical castration, which is not medically indicated at this point in the course of PrCA. Castration can and will be offered to these men at the first clinical symptom or sign of metastatic cancer, at which time those men will come off this study. It also is important to note that if the intervention results in reductions in PSA then the investigators will offer it to all men who had been randomized to the control condition initially. The investigators will conduct this randomized study in 60 asymptomatic men who have undergone radical prostatectomy (removal of the prostate gland) as their primary therapy of biopsy-confirmed adenocarcinoma of the prostate and subsequently have been found to have rising PSA levels, indicating an early recurrence of the cancer. Half (30) of these men will be randomized to usual care (watchful waiting) and the other half to an intervention consisting of a vegetable-based diet, program of physical activity timed to the natural rhythm of the day (i.e., circadian, or "around the day" - basically to timing of their exercise to improve their sleep cycles), and mindfulness-based stress reduction (consisting of meditation and other stress-reducing techniques). The intervention will continue for three months, followed by monthly booster sessions for 9 months. Data will be collected on compliance with the intervention and other factors that could modify the intervention or confuse our interpretation of its effect. The overall goal of the study will be to see the effect of making these behavioral and attitudinal changes on PSA levels, an indicator of disease progression in these men. The therapies the investigators will study are completely non-toxic and behavioral in nature.