Hinsdale Magazine August 2019

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HINSDALE’S FIRST MAGAZINE $5 US VOLUME 9 ISSUE 8

MEN’S HEALTH

EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW WITH HINSDALE’S DR. BRIAN MORAN

FARM-TO-TABLE FARE INSIDE HINSDALE: LY HOTCHKIN

HINSDALE CENTRAL FOOTBALL PREVIEW

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Hinsdale Magazine | Cover Story

MEN’S HEALTH

Exclusive Interview with Hinsdale’s Dr. Brian Moran Pioneer and Cancer Survivor

BY SCOTT JONLICH | PHOTOGRAPH BY DANIEL GARCIA

Brian J. Moran, MD is

Medical Director of Chicago Prostate Cancer Center, which he helped found in 1997.

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Brian Moran knew at an early age he wanted to help people.

In 1978, while a senior at Hinsdale Central High School, he was diagnosed with aggressive testicular cancer. Moran found himself gravitating towards medicine after the cancer came back, and participated in a clinical study at Indiana University, where he received chemotherapy. He has fortunately been cancer-free ever since.

“I knew what [cancer patients] were going through, and I ended up in the field of radiation oncology,” Moran said.

Moran went on to medical school, and eventually pursued a career to advance the practice of brachytherapy using radioactive materials surgically implanted to treat the cancers. He founded Chicago Prostate Center in 1997, after realizing the procedures in the hospital setting were inefficient – and by no fault of the hospitals, but simply due to the complexity of the procedure. At the time, the concept of focused healthcare centers of excellence was coming into play in medicine, and the Chicago Prostate Center building became the location for a single procedure for men across the nation and the world. Moran was involved with the early development of this procedure through his colleagues in Seattle and Europe, which eventually became popular in the United States.

SCOTT JONLICH: You gave me the opportunity to watch an actual surgery, which was really amazing. Tell me the specific material and the process of implanting the seeds.DR. BRIAN MORAN: The first step is to diagnose the cancer of the prostate, and then (during the procedure) we actually place small radioactive seeds or pellets into the prostate using a small needle. There’s no incision involved, and this is done under ultrasound guidance.

It’s very exact. We can place these little pellets within a millimeter of each other. And what they do is, they’ll give off a very intense but localized dose of radiation just to the cancer. The results have been outstanding, with similar cure rates to other treatment options, and it allows the patient to maintain a quality of life. The patient is able to go about their business a few hours after the procedure and go home.

SCOTT JONLICH: The Chicago center has become part of DuPage Medical Group as of April 1. Tell me about that process and how it came about.DR. BRIAN MORAN: Medicine is changing. Chicago Prostate Center was its own facility and its own entity, and so with all of the changes in medicine today, from a provider standpoint, we thought it was best to align ourselves with a forward-thinking group; and clearly DuPage Medical Group is on the move, and so it’s been a great relationship.

SCOTT JONLICH: What should men specifically be aware of when it comes to their prostates, from awareness to precautionary things they need to do?DR. BRIAN MORAN: I would say prostate cancer does not discriminate. It doesn’t matter if you’re rich or poor, black or white, young or old; it’s there, and there are varying degrees of severity of the cancer. Some are non-threatening and others are very aggressive.

But today, with early diagnosis and screening through a blood-test and a digital rectal exam, we’re able to identify these cancers in the early stages. The screening recommendations are men at age 50 should have that PSA test and a digital exam. If you have a family history, meaning your father or brothers, then you should have it performed at age 40, or if you’re African-American.

Continued on the next page

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Hinsdale Magazine | Cover Story

“Prostate cancer does not discriminate. It doesn’t matter if you’re rich or poor, black or white, young or old; it’s there, and there are varying degrees of severity of the cancer.” —DR. BRIAN MORAN

SCOTT JONLICH: For those who are not familiar with PSA, what is a safe level or a normal range?DR. BRIAN MORAN: It’s relatively age-dependent. Anything under four is considered a normal range, but as men get older, PSAs can can be more elevated than four, and still not harbor cancer. As men get older, prostates can get larger, and as a result, your PSA can have a higher baseline level.

SCOTT JONLICH: What should men be aware of with regard to risks, diet? Should we be loading up on tomatoes (for the lycopene benefit)?DR. BRIAN MORAN: Tomatoes have been shown not to be true. Most people would say anything with a high fat diet and genetics are probably your two top risk factors. Today, we have so much technology available to identify patients’ risk factors. Once we diagnose the cancer, we can see how serious [of a] cancer it is; and this is all done through genomics, which is the study of the genes involving the malignancy; and some, as I said, are very aggressive, and others are not as aggressive.

SCOTT JONLICH: What is the future of prostate treatment? Obviously, this is the cutting-edge. How do you how do you see it progressing five to ten years from now?DR. BRIAN MORAN: It’s hard to say. I think [around] the world, we’re learning a lot about the genetics of these cancers, and how do I identify which ones are a greater risk to a man’s life versus others. I think they’ve made significant advances in surgery to remove the prostate. They’ve made significant advances in the external beam technology, and obviously with the brachytherapy or the seed implants, but I think it really comes down to what a man’s most comfortable with as far as his decision. Some cancers can be left alone and watched closely. We call that active surveillance.

SCOTT JONLICH: When I was at your Chicago Prostate Center a few months ago, you gave me a tour, and I noticed you have some programs and seminars of events. Can you talk about that so local men and our readers can be informed?DR. BRIAN MORAN: Sure, the Prostate Cancer Foundation of Chicago is a very active foundation committed to education and awareness, and they have a monthly informational meeting the first Wednesday of every month

at 7 p.m. In January and in July, they moved that meeting to a morning meeting at 10 a.m. at 815 Pasquinelli Drive in Westmont. We will be moving that soon to the Wellness House [in Hinsdale]. They’ve been very generous [in] offering us space, and the reason for that is it’s become so popular. We’ll have anywhere between 70 to 100 men every month. It’s an opportunity for men who are newly diagnosed to go and meet men that have been through treatment, whether it’s surgery or radiation or seeds. It’s just a very nice forum with guest speakers and questions and answers.

SCOTT JONLICH: Dr. Moran, is there anything else that you want to talk about in terms of your medical field and the future of the Chicago Prostate Center?DR. BRIAN MORAN: I think the future is exciting. We publish quite a bit of our data, and it’s well-received. The biopsy technique that we use is a mapping biopsy, and that is opening the door for potential we call focal therapy; so instead of just treating the whole prostate, we’re able to just treat where the cancer is, and then we’ve got an active study on that that’s very encouraging. There is a precedent to that. It’s no different than in the past, when women had breast cancer, a mastectomy was a the treatment of choice, by removing the whole breast; and now most commonly it’s called the lumpectomy, where we just remove the tumor and use the radiation to the breast afterwards.

SCOTT JONLICH: I know with both men and women, you hear the words “early detection,” and it goes in one ear and out the other sometimes. How important is early detection?DR. BRIAN MORAN: It’s so simple; it’s a simple bloodtest and exam, and the vast majority of them, we’ve done screenings--95 percent of men will be fine. But it’s that five percent you want to find.

SCOTT JONLICH: I was fortunate that I had that quick fiveminute exam. I felt a sense of relief, because it’s always in the back of your mind that, “What if I’m in the five percent?” It’s a great feeling knowing that your PSA is normal--and that is one message I would like our readers to know.DR. BRIAN MORAN: It’s one thing you can take off your worry-meter. n

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