A Promising New Screen for Prostate Cancer
The prostate-specific antigen (PSA) test, used to screen for prostate cancer, is imperfect. It often flags conditions that turn out to be benign, resulting in unnecessary biopsies for more than a million men every year, and it misses other cases of cancer entirely. So the search is on for a better way to find the disease and avoid needless bother and pain for those who don’t have it.
Researchers at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine think they have a promising candidate. In the April issue of Urology, they report that they’ve found another marker in the blood, a protein called EPCA-2, which in a preliminary study did a far better job than the PSA at pointing to real cancers and ignoring noncancers. It also predicted whether a man’s cancer was confined to the prostate gland or had spread beyond it, a key piece of information in deciding how to treat it. While there have been other potential improvements over the PSA, “only a handful have shown this type of results,” says Robert Uzzo, a urologic oncologist at the Fox Chase Cancer Center in Philadelphia who wasn’t involved with the study.
Source: www.usnews.com
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