Prostate cancer screening and determining the appropriate prostate-specific antigen cutoff values.
Prostate-specific antigen (PSA) in combination with digital rectal examination forms the basis for current prostate cancer (CaP) screening programs. Although PSA screening was recently shown to reduce CaP-specific mortality in the European randomized trial, its limitations include the risk for unnecessary prostate biopsy and the diagnosis and treatment of some CaP that might never have caused suffering or death. A potential way to minimize these pitfalls is through the use of derivatives of PSA, particularly PSA kinetics, to increase the specificity for clinically relevant CaP. CaP is the second-leading cause of cancer death in men in the United States and many other westernized countries; accordingly, judicious screening of healthy men allows for diagnosis sufficiently early that all options (i.e., treatment or surveillance) are still available in most cases.
Robert H. Lurie Comprehensive Cancer Center, Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, Chicago, Illinois 60611, USA. wcatalona@nmff.org
William J
WJ
Catalona
Stacy
S
Loeb
D000328:Adult; D055088:Early Detection of Cancer; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D017430:Prostate-Specific Antigen / Q000097:blood*; D011471:Prostatic Neoplasms / Q000097:blood / Q000175:diagnosis*; D012016:Reference Values
D017430:Prostate-Specific Antigen