Saturday, September 11, 2004

Medicine: PSA 'all but useless'?

Our job now is to stop removing every man's prostate who has prostate cancer. We originally thought we were doing the right thing, but we are now figuring out how we went wrong. Some men need prostate treatment but certainly not all of them.

PSA tests determine the level of a certain protein that reflects the size of the prostate--the size, but not necessarily if the thing is cancerous or not. BPH (benign prostate hypertrophy) is something pretty inevitable. The thing is going to get bigger as you get older, and you're going to have to push really hard to pee (if youre a guy, that is). But is the surgery, which has a high incidence of damaging some nerve down there that I remember dissecting last year but can't remember the name of (and is responsible for getting you up), worth it? Doesn't look like urologists will be using PSA to decide any more.

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