Prostate Specific Antigen as a Clinical Biomarker for Prostate Cancer:
What's the Take Home Message?

Leach FS, Koh MS, Chan YW, Bark S, Ray R, Morton RA, Remaley AT.

Department of Urology, Baylor College of Medicine, Houston, Texas, USA.

Prostate specific antigen (PSA) continues to be challenged as a legitimate
clinical biomarker in early detection of prostate cancer due to lack of
specificity for malignant transformation. Skepticism surrounding the utility
of serum PSA as a clinical marker is not new and many questioned its initial
use in widespread prostate cancer screening due to non-specific expression
and low predictive value for cancer detection. Despite these initial
concerns, serum PSA measurement along with digital rectal examination (DRE)
is currently the accepted practice for prostate cancer screening in the
United States with hundreds of thousands of men undergoing serum PSA
measurement each year. In contrast to its role for early detection, serum
PSA measurement as a surrogate for prostate cancer recurrence (biochemical
failure) following curative intent therapy has consummate clinical utility
in post-treatment surveillance. As thousands of men each year are
aggressively treated for potentially curable prostate cancer, development of
simple and effective diagnostic tools for detecting treatment failures
should be an important area of biomedical and clinical investigation.

We have constructed and tested a home-based prostate cancer surveillance
device for use by patients to detect PSA from blood obtained by finger
stick. Our initial results suggest that home based PSA testing is feasible
and may have clinical utility in management of men treated for prostate
cancer.

PMID: 15846084 [PubMed - as supplied by publisher]