Treatment: Blood test offers better prostate cancer measure

Australian doctors say the chances of finding better ways to treat prostate cancer have been boosted by the discovery that the blood test commonly used to detect the disease could also help identify which drugs are most effective in combating the condition.

Researchers have identified a new way to measure how well patients do with experimental treatments using the prostate specific antigen or PSA blood test.

They say it could halve the length of time of future clinical trials in prostate cancer and accelerate progress towards a cure.

Their results, published in the Lancet Oncology this week, show that two measures of PSA can show how quickly prostate cancer has returned and the rate at which it is growing, thereby allowing doctors to track the effects of new drugs over a shorter time.

West Australian, 1/11/08, p62

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