Prostrate Testing

Can This Test Be Saved? Improving on PSA for Prostate Cancer Screening

Screening for prostate cancer is controversial and very likely will be for the foreseeable future, or at least until better tools are available to suss out which cases of cancer need aggressive treatment and which are unlikely to cause harm and thus can be monitored or left alone. Plenty of researchers are working hard in pursuit of that goal; some are using variants of the prostate-specific antigen

test, and others are going in different directions entirely, U.S. News's Katherine Hobson writes.

Right now, the American Cancer Society recommends that physicians discuss the pros and cons of screening with the PSA test with male patients ages 50 and up if they're at average risk (and at a younger age if they're at higher risk). For those who opt for screening, the society says that men whose PSA levels are less than 2.5 ng/mL can be screened every other year rather than annually.

But there is another way to use the test, says Andrew Vickers, an associate attending research methodologist at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York. Research conducted in Sweden suggests that a reading taken between ages 45 and 50 "is an extremely good predictor of whether you're [at] a long-term risk of having a 'bad' prostate cancer," says Vickers. Read more.

-- Carl