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GU Cancers 2026 | 2026 updates in PC-PEP, a six-month home program for prostate cancer

Robert Rutledge, MD, FRCPC, Dalhousie University, Halifax, Canada, provides an overview of the Prostate Cancer Patient Empowerment Program (PC-PEP), a comprehensive six-month daily home-based health promotion program for men with a prostate cancer diagnosis. The program has been shown to benefit various subpopulations of patients, including rural patients, the LGBT+ community, and African Canadian or black men, with improvements in quality of life, mental health, and reductions in mental distress. This interview took place at the 2026 ASCO GU Cancers Symposium in San Francisco, CA.

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Transcript

So Prostate Cancer Patient Empowerment Program, PCPEP.org, is a six-month daily home-based program that is very comprehensive, a health promotion program for any man who’s had a prostate cancer diagnosis of any stage at any time. And what we’ve been able to see, we’re now in the midst of a phase four international implementation trial that’s now updated and ongoing on four continents and we’re growing so we’re actually looking for clinicians in multiple countries to contribute patients that are free for the patients and actually free for the clinicians as well so the update is that we’re finding that there are subpopulations of patients that are actually benefiting just as much, if not more, than the men in the general population...

So Prostate Cancer Patient Empowerment Program, PCPEP.org, is a six-month daily home-based program that is very comprehensive, a health promotion program for any man who’s had a prostate cancer diagnosis of any stage at any time. And what we’ve been able to see, we’re now in the midst of a phase four international implementation trial that’s now updated and ongoing on four continents and we’re growing so we’re actually looking for clinicians in multiple countries to contribute patients that are free for the patients and actually free for the clinicians as well so the update is that we’re finding that there are subpopulations of patients that are actually benefiting just as much, if not more, than the men in the general population. So we looked at rural patients. So we worry about the fact that we don’t have access to kind of in-person programming. And so these men can access the program through their internet. And we showed that the men in rural Canada, rural international globally, benefited just as much as those who lived in urban centers. Secondly, we looked at the 2GBQ plus community. These men are actually at a very high level of distress coming in, have a lot of issues around discrimination within the medical system and so on and what we showed is that through going through the program they actually had a greater impact they had more improvement in their quality of life better improvements in their mental health than the average so they really benefited partly because they’re drawn into community they’re getting specific programming that we’re helping for we’ve analyzed 800 men as well, looking at men from the African Canadian community or black men. And it seems that there is a particular issue. They’re facing erectile dysfunction, for instance, urinary issues, and they seem to also benefit. So multiple populations seem to be benefiting. And the other really exciting thing is that the phase three trial showed that mental distress was improved at six months and 12 months. And we’ve actually looked at the phase four trial, so the international trial, and it maps exactly onto that curve. And so we’re getting reassurance that the program is very helpful in multiple cultures for multiple men.

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