Prostate scans improve diagnosis

Survival rates for prostate cancer would improve if all men suspected of having the disease were given MRI scans, a new study suggests. Currently, men with clinical signs of cancer (such as raised PSA levels) are usually given a biopsy: more than 100,000 a year are carried out in the UK. But as a
diagnostic test, this exploratory surgery is far from ideal. Biopsies can have painful, and sometimes serious side effects. Being based on samples taken from various parts of the prostate, they’re also not very accurate: biopsies can miss the cancer altogether, and do not reliably distinguish between aggressive forms of the disease that require immediate treatment and those that require only monitoring. To test whether using advanced MP-MRI scans would be more effective, a team from University College London arranged for 576 men with signs of prostate cancer to be given both scans and biopsies. Their results suggest that if all patients were given an initial MRI, one in four could safely be spared having an immediate biopsy; that using the scans could reduce rates of overdiagnosis
– when patients are given treatments for cancers that later prove harmless – by 5%; and that carrying out biopsies guided by scan findings could lead to up to 18% more cases of clinically significant cancers being detected. “This is the biggest leap forward in prostate cancer diagnosis in decades, with the potential to save many lives,” said Angela Culhane, chief executive of Prostate Cancer UK.