Prostate cancer is a disease that only affects men. It happens when cells in the prostate, a small gland that makes semen, start to grow out of control.
Some prostate cancers grow slowly and may need minimal or no treatment, but others are aggressive and can spread quickly.
The Problem with Current Prostate Cancer Screening
Doctors usually use a blood test called the Prostate-Specific Antigen (PSA) test to check for prostate cancer. This test measures the amount of PSA in your blood.
High PSA levels could mean you have prostate cancer. But the problem is, high PSA levels can also be due to other things that are not cancer, like an infection or just old age.
The Challenge with the PSA Test
The big problem with the PSA test is that it often gives a “false positive.” This means that the test says you have cancer when you really don’t.
Because of this, the test is not recommended for men over 70, and it’s up to younger men to decide if they want to take the test.
Scientists at Stanford Medicine in California think they’ve found a way to make the Prostate-Specific Antigen PSA test more accurate. They believe that by looking at a man’s genetics, they can better understand his PSA levels.
They suggest that using a regular PSA test and a special genetic analysis could help better predict dangerous cancers.
The research is important because prostate cancer is becoming more common.
The American Cancer Society found that prostate cancer rates increased by 3% a year between 2014 and 2019. Also, advanced prostate cancers increased by about 5% a year.
In the study, scientists looked at the genomes (a person’s complete set of DNA) and PSA levels of nearly 96,000 men who did not have prostate cancer.
They did this to understand the genetics behind normal variation in PSA levels. They found that 30% to 40% of the variation in each man’s PSA levels was due to genetic factors not related to cancer.
The Results
Using their findings, the researchers developed a way to adjust PSA levels for normal genetic variations.
They then tested their method on a separate group of nearly 32,000 men. They found that their method could predict about 10% of the variation in PSA levels.
The Next Steps
There is still more work to do. The researchers plan to do a larger study that includes more men from different backgrounds to improve the accuracy of the test.
They believe that even a small improvement in the PSA test could save lives.
One in nine men in the United States will be diagnosed with prostate cancer, and one in 40 will die from it, so better tests are needed. The study was published in the journal Nature Medicine.
If you care about prostate health, please read studies that coffee may help lower the risk of prostate cancer, and dairy foods may increase men’s risk of prostate cancer.
For more information about health, please see recent studies that a low-carb diet could increase overall cancer risk, and results showing vitamin D supplements strongly reduce cancer death.
The study was published in Nature Medicine.
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