Friday, February 25, 2011

Study Knocks Diagnostic Value of PSA Velocity

By Charles Bankhead, Staff Writer, MedPage Today

If prostate biopsy is based on PSA velocity alone, the number of unnecessary biopsies would be almost four times the number of additional cancers diagnosed, data from a large clinical trial showed.

In the absence of other predictive factors, PSA velocity would have identified 115 prostate cancers at a cost of 433 unnecessary biopsies, according to Andrew Vickers, PhD, of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York City and colleagues.

If used as sole justification for a biopsy, PSA velocity would trigger about one of every seven prostate biopsies, they reported online in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute.

Moreover, adding PSA velocity to a multifactor model resulted in minuscule improvement in diagnostic accuracy, particularly for high-grade cancers.

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