An international team of researchers has created a prostate cancer detection method that promises 94% accuracy. It is also a non-invasive test, which could facilitate the diagnostic process of one of the cancers with the most victims.
94% accuracy. The test is called Prostate Screening EpiSwitch (PSE), and according to the first results on its ability to detect this type of cancer, its accuracy reaches 94%. This represents an improvement with respect to other non-invasive tests for the detection and subsequent diagnosis of this disease.
In its tests, the test has also shown 92% sensitivity, the metric that establishes its ability to obtain correct positive results; and 94% in specificity, the metric that establishes your ability to obtain correct negative results.
“By testing it in the context of surveying the population at risk, the PSE test has provided rapid and minimally invasive diagnosis with impressive performance. This suggests a real benefit both for diagnostic and probing purposes,” explains Dmitry Pshezhetskiy, one of the study authors, in a press release.
Joint work. Pshezhetskiy speaks of the population at risk since the test has been analyzed in this specific group. Specifically, the study compared the test in 147 participants, of whom 38 had been confirmed as cancer patients despite having negative results in their controls.
The results and details of the test have been published in an article in the journal Cancers. Behind this work is a team of researchers from various British and Indian universities, as well as the company Oxford BioDynamics.
A step in early detection. The importance of this innovation lies in the difficulties we have today for the correct diagnosis of prostate cancer. It is a cancer whose symptoms are not specific, which often delays its diagnosis and implies higher mortality rates.
The main screening test we have is the PSA (prostate-specific antigen) blood antigen test. To this can be added physical exams, scans and biopsies. However, as Pshezhetskiy points out, PSA tests are not used with the general population as they are unreliable, which would lead to numerous unnecessary biopsies (three quarters of positive PSA tests result in negative biopsies) and failure to detect Real cases.
Therein lies the importance of this new development. Of course, it will still have to be put to the test in clinical trials with a greater number of participants to be able to prove its reliability with greater precision.
The most common among men. According to data from the Spanish Society of Medical Oncology (SEOM), with 100,000 new cases per year, prostate cancer was the fourth most diagnosed type of cancer in the world behind breast, lung and colorectal cancer in 2020.
In Spain, with 35,764 new cases in 2021, it was the second, only below colorectal. It was also the third deadliest in men (with lung cancer ranking first). A more accurate and rapid diagnosis may help the survival of many patients in the future.
Imagen | National Cancer Institute
