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Friday, April 27, 2007Robert Getzenberg, director of urology research at the Brady Urological Institute at Hopkins and lead author, cautions that it will take more extensive trials to nail down whether EPCA-2 might someday become a screening test that either complements or replaces the PSA test. In this study of 385 men, the test was negative in 97 percent of those who didn't have cancer, which means only 3 percent of men got false positive results. (Meantime, PSA test results cause 1.6 million men to have biopsies every year, only 20 percent of whom actually have cancer.) It was also adept at distinguishing between cancer and enlarged prostate: Seventy-seven percent of men with the benign condition had a negative EPCA-2 test. And it didn't miss many cancers either–about 10 percent of cancers limited to the prostate and 2 percent of those that had spread outside the gland. It also picked out 78 percent of the cancers in men who had normal PSA results but nonetheless had prostate cancer. EPCA is early prostate cancer antigen, a protein that has been found in malignant and pre-malignant prostate cells. EPCA-2 is one of several of these proteins that are being studied. It's been in the news before, but this most recent study involved more subjects than the earlier one. Biologically, it's certainly more specific than the PSA, which is a general protein found in both normal and malignant prostate cells. The question still remains, however, whether or not finding slow growing prostate cancers early makes any difference. posted by Sydney on 4/27/2007 07:54:00 AM 4 comments 4 Comments:
"The question still remains, however, whether or not finding slow growing prostate cancers early makes any difference."
Jake,
I agree that a radical prostatectomy should be avoided if possible, but waiting is not the way to accomplish that goal. Early treatment is.
Jake, you cannot just compare percentage of people die from those diagnosed to prove your point unless you know the extent of overdiagnosis. Ever learned division in elementary school? Like when your nominator is the same, but your denominator is larger, the result of the division is smaller? So even if screening had absolutely no effect (and we don't know at this point that it does), because the screening discovers a lot of cancers that would've never been discovered in person's lifetime if remained undetected, the number-people-who-die/number-of-people-diagnosed would still be smaller. Because you are dividing by larger number. By 10:30 PM , at |
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