Health and Prostate

Detecting Prostate Cancer: Prostate-Specific Antigen Assay If prostate cancer is diagnosed and treated during early stages, patients have a 5-year survival rate of 94%. However, the difficulty lies in the diagnosis. Prostate cancer is usually a silently spreading disease with no symptoms until the cancer has spread beyond the prostate into surrounding organs, bones, or lymph nodes. Fortunately, there is a superb tissue-specific serum marker - the prostate-specific antigen (PSA) - that is highly effective for detecting early prostate cancer. Developed 10 years ago, the prostate-specific antigen assay has revolutionized the diagnosis of prostate cancer. It has also revolutionized patient monitoring. Serum concentrations of PSA are usually less than 4 ng/mL in men with no prostate disease. Concentrations increase by about 0.3 ng/mL per gm of tissue with benign prostatic hyperplasia and by 3 ng/mL/gm with prostate cancer. In absolute values, levels less than 10 are usually considered favorable; levels greater than 50 indicate cancer and suggest that the tumor may already have spread beyond the prostate. Read more [...]