Urine test for prostate cancer

This development might save guys  a lot of pain and suffering — with unnecessary biopsies and even unnecessary surgeries and radiation.

A new urine test may be "significantly better" at identifying aggressive prostate cancer than a PSA test, which is very unreliable as most everyone knows. Here's the article from the Los Angeles Times article with all the details and the link to the journal Science Translational Medicine, where the study was published.

The urine test could be a first step toward putting the brakes on overtreatment, which takes place about half the time when prostate cancer is detected through a PSA test and then verified with a biopsy.  Biopsies can't differentiate between nonaggressive and aggressive cancers, so treatment is often recommended when cancer is found.

I suspect the way it MIGHT work is that physicians will continue to give PSA tests. But if cancer is detected, they might then take the urine test and see if the lab can find the two gene markers for aggressive prostate cancer in the urine. If the markers are not found, guys could be spared a biopsy and treatment — instead, proceed on a "watchful waiting" track.

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