Study reveals 70 percent of prostate biopsies not necessary
A painful biopsy is usually the next step for any guy whose PSA number goes above what’s considered “normal.”
Now, however, a group of researchers from the Netherlands are saying that there’s another way to diagnose prostate cancer — one that’s much more reliable and even painless!
Have these scientists found a way for untold numbers of men to avoid having a needle puncture their prostate? Well, maybe.
But this research also revealed something else: The truth about how many guys are stabbed, cut and irradiated for no good reason at all.
Dr. Arnout Alberts from the Erasmus Medical Center in Rotterdam believes that his findings “could change the balance of the equation” for men and prostate testing.
What Dr. Alberts and his team are proposing is that doctors start screening for prostate cancer by using Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) instead of a Prostate-specific antigen (PSA) test.
The PSA test is notoriously unreliable. We first warned you over ten years ago that a single result should never be the reason to have a biopsy.
And even the doctor who invented the test says that PSA readings are not “cancer specific.” That means a high reading is not necessarily a sign that a man has prostate cancer, any more than a low reading means he doesn’t.
The upside of MRI screening, they said, is that compared to the PSA test, something “riddled with complexities,” it could cut the overdiagnosis of “insignificant” prostate cancer (that would never have caused you problems) by 50 percent.
It would also eliminate 70 percent of unnecessary biopsies in guys over 70.
Wait. So they’re admitting that half of prostate cancers are overdiagnosed in men that age? And that the lion’s share of painful biopsies, which can cause infections and bleeding into the urethra or bladder, aren’t even warranted?
Those are some sobering numbers that should give any man pause who’s being rushed into getting a biopsy based on a PSA — and certainly those who are told that surgery and radiation is the only answer.
And as we’ve reported to you many times, the evidence is clear as day that most guys with early prostate cancer are best treated with what’s called “active surveillance.”
The most recent study on that was released late last year, and found that after a ten-year follow-up on over 1,600 men with early prostate cancer, “virtually no one had died” from the disease.
In fact, the men who received active surveillance had the exact same survival rate as those who received radiation treatments or surgery. And that’s just one study of many.
The downside of MRI screening for prostate cancer, however, is the cost, which can run into the thousands and likely (right now, anyway) won’t be covered by your insurance.
I asked Dr. Spreen what his take is on this. He said that while he’s “for it,” the cost is the “real fly-in-the-ointment.”
But he also warned about something else that the researchers of the new study never even mentioned: the MRI contrast dye that “radiologists cooked up for their own convenience,” called gadolinium.
This highly toxic substance must be bound to another molecule so that it doesn’t immediately poison you, with your kidneys flushing it out before it becomes toxic again. That scenario, however, doesn’t always go as planned. Which is why Dr. Spreen warns that a contrast MRI, is something that should be “adamantly refused by any patient.”
Currently, a large trial is underway using MRI screenings to diagnose prostate cancer in place of PSA testing. I’ll be following that research and keep you posted.
“Is MRI the ‘mammography’ of prostate cancer screening?” Steven Reinberg, March 25, 2017, HealthDay, consumer.healthday.com
