This forum is for the discussion of anything to do with Prostate Cancer. There are only four rules:
No fundraisers, no commercials (although it is OK to recommend choices of treatment or medical people based on your personal research; invitations to participate in third-party surveys are also acceptable, provided there is no compensation to YANA);
No harvesting e-mail addresses for Spam;
No insults or flaming - be polite and respectful at all times and understand that there may be a variety of points of view, all of which may have some validity;
Opinions are OK, but please provide as much factual evidence as possible for any assertions that you are making
Failure to abide by these simple rules will result in the immediate and permanent suspension of your posting privileges.
Since this is an International Forum, please specify your location in your post.
As Mike Scott says in the second of these pieces Over the next few years we are going to see the development and marketing of a plethora of new tests related to the diagnosis and prognosis of prostate cancer. Some of these tests may have high utility and value. Others are likely to have a much lower value (but still see high use).
Since you seem to be very interested in all the new developments, may I suggest you check The "New" Prostate Cancer Infolink regularly. Mike Scott who collates the information and who makes the commentaries on the site is very knowledgeable and is often able to explain the potential value of new developments more clearly than some of the media releases, many of which tend to overstate this value.
In theory, these data suggest that the Prolaris test should be capable of discriminating between good and poor candidates for active surveillance. However, there may be a fly in the ointment. As yet we are not aware of any data showing that the Prolaris test can make accurate predictions based on tissue from an initial prostate biopsy, but such biopsy-derived tissue is what is available to the pathologist in the vast majority of cases prior to a decision whether to treat or to monitor individual patients. If the Prolaris test can only be used with accuracy on tissue available after a TURP or a radical prostatectomy, this will severely curtail the potential utility of this test.
I assume you aren't going to have surgery to get enough material for the test?
