Urine test may improve prostate screening
Analysis might shed light on iffy PSA scores
By Nathan Seppa
Every year hundreds of thousands of men getting a physical examination find themselves in a gray zone, showing signs of prostate cancer on a common blood test. A new urine analysis might clarify which of these men is most at risk and should take the more definitive, and invasive, step of getting a prostate biopsy.
Beyond a physical exam of the prostate, the standard screening method for prostate cancer is a blood test that measures levels of a protein called prostate specific antigen, or PSA. Although it’s a rough measure at best, an elevated PSA score is enough to send 600,000 to 1 million U.S. men each year to get a biopsy.
Writing in the Aug. 3 Science Translational Medicine, scientists who devised a test based on levels of two compounds detectable in urine found that the combination may serve as a marker of cancer and take some of the guesswork out of interpreting PSA scores, which are often unreliable in predicting malignancies.
“I think this is ready for the clinic,” says study coauthor Scott Tomlins, a pathologist at the University of Michigan Medical School in Ann Arbor. “In the near future, it should be available to patients.”