Prostate Cancer Testing
Recent Issues

Prostate cancer testing is an important part of preventative medicine. Digital rectal exams, together with testing for Prostate Specific Antigen (PSA) are supposed to provide a degree of confidence that a patient being examined if free of cancer if no lumps are found in the rectal exam, and if the PSA value is low. However, two papers in the New England Journal of Medicine (in volumes 350 and 351, 2004) raise questions about these assumptions. The first casts significant doubt on the assumption that low PSA implies being cancer-free. The second finds a strong correlation between the rate at which PSA increases (rather than the absolute value), and the risk associated with the cancer.

The following pages present these developments.


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