A new Swedish study has shown that a new test for prostate cancer is better at detecting aggressive cancer than prostate-specific antigen (PSA).
Prostate cancer is the second most common cancer among men worldwide, with over 1.2 million diagnosed in 2012. Currently, PSA is used to diagnose prostate cancer, but the procedure has long been controversial. “PSA cannot distinguish between aggressive cancer and more indolent tumours,” said principal investigator Professor Henrik Grönberg. “Today, men who don’t have cancer or who have a form of cancer that does not need treating must go through an unnecessary, painful and sometimes dangerous course of treatment. In addition, PSA misses many aggressive cancers. We therefore decided to develop a more precise test that could potentially replace PSA.”
The new STHLM3 test is a blood test that analyses a combination of six protein markers, over 200 genetic markers and clinical data (ie age, family history and previous prostate biopsies). The test has been developed by researchers at Karolinska Institutet in collaboration with Thermo Fisher Scientific, which provided the protein and genetic marker assays used in the clinical study.
The study, which is reported in The Lancet Oncology (Grönberg H, Adolfsson J, Aly M et al. Prostate cancer screening in men 50–69 years (STHLM3): a prospective population-based diagnostic study. Lancet Oncol 2015 Novr 9 http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/S1470-2045[15]00361-7), included 58,818 men from Stockholm aged 50 to 69 and was conducted between 2012 and 2014. The STHLM3 test and PSA were performed on all participants and then compared. The results show that the STHLM3 test reduced the number of biopsies by 30% without compromising patient safety.