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Thursday, July 24, 2003The Harvard Medical School researchers are advising that more doctors lower the threshold -- from 4.1 on the Prostate-Specific Antigen test to 2.6 -- for when they recommend biopsies to determine if men indeed have cancer. The goal: catching prostate cancer -- which kills nearly 30,000 men a year and is particularly rampant among African Americans -- before it spreads outside the prostate gland. ''We're lowering the bar,'' said Dr. Cosme A. Gomez, a urological oncologist and chief of urology at Baptist and South Miami hospitals. The researchers are assuming that every case of prostate cancer they detect is potentially lethal, but as the article points out in the end, that isn't necessarily the case. In fact, most men don't die from their prostate cancer, they live and die with it. And if it weren't for the PSA and the biopsy, they'd die never realizing they had it. The real challenge in screening for prostate cancer is not to find methods that detect it earlier, but to find a screening method that can differentiate aggressive prostate cancer from the benign, slow-growing type. The study can be found here . posted by Sydney on 7/24/2003 07:41:00 AM 0 comments 0 Comments: |
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