According to an Oregon study, men with very high PSA densities are at a greater risk of later being diagnosed with prostate cancers than men with lower scores, even though both groups had clean prostate biopsies. If the new study is approved by more scientists, it could save the lives of many men.
AP quotes Dr. Mark Garzotto, an Oregon Health and Science University Cancer Institute researcher, as saying, "It's that 1 in 10 men that do have a life-threatening cancer that we wanted to identify." Garzotto recently presented the study at a cancer conference in Florida.
According to statistics, about 27,000 U.S. men will die this year. Prostate biopsies can find more than 200,000 tumors, but results show they fail to find tumors in 20 to 33 percent of men who have one.
Many doctors are recommending second biopsies a few months after a clean test. "With less than 1 percent of the prostate sampled, we're trying to get the pathologist to tell us if the guy has cancer or not, which is an impossible task," said Garzotto.
Garzotto and his team kept track of 511 patients at the Veterans Affairs Medical Center, where all men had clear initial prostate biopsies. But 112 were later found to have cancer, 52 of them aggressive tumors that can be deadly.
However, two years after their clean biopsies, 23 percent of the men in the high-risk group had aggressive cancer compared to 4 percent of the low-risk men. After four years, the rate was 36 percent in the high-risk group and 9 percent in the other.
Furthermore, scientists have also found that men with the highest level of C-reactive protein died significantly sooner than men with lower levels. C-reactive protein is a sign of inflammation. It is linked to cancer progression and resistance to cancer treatment.
