Not talked about Prostate Cancer for a while, but here's a 'good news' article from the Daily Mail this week. I'm sure my brother Andre will be slightly relieved.
A cheap, easy and accurate test for prostate cancer could be in surgeries within months.
Studies show the new urine test to be twice as reliable as the existing blood test for detecting the disease – the most common cancer among British men.
It also tells doctors how serious the cancer is.
This means it should not only save lives but also spare men painful, embarrassing and unnecessary tests and treatments.
The new test – described as potentially the biggest breakthrough in prostate cancer diagnosis in 25 years – does not involve a rectal examination.
It is likely to cost as little as £10 a patient, and the price tag, combined with its accuracy and simplicity, could even lead to all older men being screened for the disease, as women are for breast cancer.
The test’s Surrey University creators have struck a deal with two companies and it is hoped it will be in doctors’ surgeries later this year. Private patients will be the first to benefit but NHS use could follow.
Inventor Hardev Pandha, a professor of medical oncology, said: ‘This new test could lead to faster detection that could save hundreds of lives and also offers the potential for huge cost savings.’
Prostate cancer is the most common cancer in British men, killing nearly 11,000 people a year, and doctors do not have a 100 per cent accurate way of spotting it.
The blood test routinely used measures levels of a protein called prostate specific antigen, or PSA, but it is wrong more often than it is right. This means many men are subjected to the pain, worry and embarrassment of unnecessary biopsies. In other cases, fledgling cancers are missed until they have spread elsewhere in the body and are harder to treat.
The new test uses a urine sample, dispensing with the need for needles. It searches the urine for a protein called EN2, which is not made by healthy people but is pumped out by tumours.
In trials, it detected about 70 per cent of prostate cancers, making it twice as accurate as the PSA test.
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