Test can predict aggressive prostate cancer

By Michael Kahn

LONDON (Reuters) - A single prostate cancer screening test before age 50 can help predict which men might develop aggressive forms of the disease, even 25 years before a diagnosis, researchers said on Friday.

The findings, published in BMC Medicine, could help doctors identify men who would benefit most from intensive screenings as they get older, the U.S. and Swedish researchers said.

Prostate cancer is the second-leading cancer killer of men after lung cancer. Each year, some 680,000 men worldwide are diagnosed with the disease and about 220,000 will die from it.

Tests that look for a compound called prostate specific antigen or PSA can help detect cancer before men experience symptoms such as an enlarged prostate.

"A single PSA test taken at or before age 50 is a very strong predictor of advanced prostate cancer diagnosed up to 25 years later," the team at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York and Sweden's Lund University wrote.

"This suggests the possibility of using an early PSA test ... so that men at highest risk are the focus of the most intensive screening efforts."

The findings follow a number of recent advances in prostate cancer.

Last week, three studies identified at least 10 new genes that raise a man's risk of prostate cancer, and U.S. researchers said on Thursday they had detected a biomarker that may help predict if a man's prostate cancer will return after surgery.