In October 2010, an article was published in Cancer Online that looked at more than 20,000 men from Sweden who had their blood drawn and stored when they were between the ages of 33 and 50. Over time, through 2006, more than 1400 of the men were diagnosed with prostate cancer.

The investigators went back and tested the blood samples of these men to see what their PSA [prostate-specific antigen] levels were up to 30 years before the diagnosis of prostate cancer was made. They found that if the PSA was > 0.63 ng/mL, they had a significant chance of developing cancer or advanced cancer many years in the future.

The bottom line is that this is interesting information and warrants further evaluation to see what would be the best approach, but it doesn’t find all men who have aggressive cancer, and it could turn out that men who have life-threatening disease might not have been detected 30 years earlier by using this PSA cutoff.

Read more:  http://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/733120