Another Attempt To Predict Lethal Prostate Cancer

Someday medical experts will figure out what everyone wants to figure out about prostate cancer: how to distinguish aggressive, life-threatening cancer from indolent, unusual cell growth that will harmlessly hang around until something else kills you first. On recent attempt at the Brigham & Women’s Hospital has persuaded researchers that measuring PSA levels in younger men (between the ages of 40 and 59) could predict future risk of lethal prostate cancer later in life. Science Daily reports on the research, which studied 30 years of data from the Physicians’ Health Study (PHS), and looked at 234 men who were diagnosed with prostate cancer, including 60 who developed lethal prostate cancer, and 711 controls, all between 40 and 59 years of age at the start of the trial. The research team measured PSA levels from stored plasma samples and followed the men’s outcomes over time. Here’s what they found: Of the lethal prostate cancer events, 82 percent, 71 percent and 86 percent occurred in men with a baseline PSA above the median at ages 40-49, 50-54 and 55-59, respectively. The study also found that men who had a PSA below median (<1.0 ng/ml) at age 60 were unlikely to develop lethal prostate cancer in the future. Senior author Lorelei Mucci, ScD, associate professor of Epidemiology in the Department of Epidemiology at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, says the study “does not imply prostate biopsy or definitive treatment is immediately required in younger men with higher PSA levels at baseline, as this could lead to over diagnosis. Rather, these men should undergo more intensive PSA screening to enable earlier identification of cancer and potential cure while still possible.”