Scientists from the Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm, Sweden have found a new and better way to detect prostate cancer, and this test can screen for the disease earlier than the conventional prostate-specific antigen (PSA) test.
Prostate cancer, the second leading cause of cancer in men, is usually detected using PSA. However, experts say this test can sometimes result in unnecessary treatments, subjecting patients to needless pain and discomfort primarily because it cannot tell if a tumor is benign or aggressive.
"Today, men who don't have cancer or who have a form of cancer that doesn't need treating must go through an unnecessary, painful and sometimes dangerous course of treatment," Dr. Henrik Gronberg, lead study author and professor of Cancer Epidemiology at the institute, said in a press release. "On top of this, PSA misses many aggressive cancers. We, therefore, decided to develop a more precise test that could potentially replace PSA."
The new blood test, called STHLM3, was developed by Karolinska Institutet researchers together with Thermo Fisher Scientific. It analyzes several areas of data: the patient's clinical data, six protein markers and more than 200 genetic markers. The researchers used STHLM3 test and PSA test on 58,818 men ages 50 to 69 and compared the results.
The researchers found that using STHLM3 cut down the number of biopsies by 30 percent, and it detected aggressive cancers that previously weren't detected.
"This is indeed promising results. If we can introduce a more accurate way of testing for prostate cancer, we'll spare patients unnecessary suffering and save resources for society," Gronberg said. "The STHLM3 tests will be available in Sweden in March 2016 and we will now start validating it in other countries and ethnic groups."
"The STHLM3 model could reduce unnecessary biopsies without compromising the ability to diagnose prostate cancer with a Gleason score of at least 7, and could be a step towards personalised risk-based prostate cancer diagnostic programmes," the authors concluded.
The study was published Nov. 9 in the journal The Lancet Oncology.
