Summary

Original source:
http://www.boston.com/news/globe/health_science/articles/2005/08/15/prostate_cancer_test_gets_another_look

Details

• ''Blood Test for Prostate Cancer Hailed," said another.
• The optimism was understandable: A high level of a protein called prostate-specific antigen, or PSA, was a clear indicator that a biopsy was needed.
• Men with supposedly low PSA scores were found to have cancer; others with high PSA scores underwent biopsies, only to find that they were OK.
• ''If we discard PSA, we're throwing out some very useful information," said Dr. Anthony D'Amico, a radiation oncologist at Brigham and Women's Hospital.
• Led in part by doctors like D'Amico, urologists and oncologists are moving away from the simple notion that there is a magic PSA number, above which a man should get a biopsy and below which he should rest assured.
• Doctors are now more focused on how a man's PSA changes over time -- particularly how fast it's rising.
• It might indicate what kind of treatment they need, or whether they need to be treated at all.
• ''It provides you with a pretty good prediction of a man's risk of prostate cancer, and more interestingly, it does a better job of finding the bad prostate cancer," said Dr. Ian M. Thompson, the chairman of urology at the University of Texas Health Science Center in San Antonio.
• There is still a long way to go before the PSA can fulfill those hopes.
• Doctors don't even have conclusive evidence that PSA screening lowers the death rate from prostate cancer, although the death rate for the disease among American men dropped 3.6 percent between 1992 and 2002 -- the years during which the test became commonplace.
• Doctors hope that a couple of large studies, one in Europe and one in the United States, will confirm the link in a couple of years.

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