The Importance Of Prostate Cancer Screening

What is a Prostate-Specific Antigen (PSA) and why is it important for men to know their PSA number?

Men should know their PSA number like my generation knew our draft number during the Vietnam War years.

PSA stands for prostate specific antigen, and it ,, s a blood test used to help detect prostate cancer. I recommend that PSA testing begin at age 40, especially if you have a father or brother with prostate cancer. Many, however, advocate starting at age 50. The test should be repeated annually.

Just like the mammogram saves millions of women ,, s lives by identifying breast cancer in its early stages, the PSA blood test can help save men ,, s lives. During breast cancer awareness month, I tell women who are making their mammogram appointments to remind their husbands or boyfriends, brothers and dads to make an appointment for prostate cancer screening.

In fact, prostate cancer is similar to breast cancer in many ways. Both tumors are fueled by hormones: estrogen in women and testosterone in men. Their incidence is about the same -- one in seven women get breast cancer, one in six men get prostate cancer " and they result in about the same number of deaths per year. In the U.S. we lose more than 30,000 to 32,000 women and 30,000 to 33,000 men a year to these cancers, respectively.

The problem is many men don ,, t want to know if they have prostate cancer. People say "Oh, prostate cancer is slow growing, don ,, t worry about it. But if it ,, s so slow growing, why do we lose so many?

There are methods for actively treating prostate cancer " surgery, radiation therapy, and chemotherapy and hormone therapy. The focus of my research at the John Wayne Cancer Institute at Saint John ,, s Health Center is to look at how and why tumors become resistant to the drugs used to fight them.

For instance with hormone therapy, we use drugs that block either hormone production or hormone "blocking , since hormones are what drive the cancer. This won ,, t kill the cancer but it may shrink the tumor or slow or stop its growth. The problem is that this approach generally works for only a few years, because the cancer cells become resistant to those drugs.

My job is to investigate and learn about the tumor cells that become resistant, and then experiment with new drugs and different ways to use those drugs to fight cancer and block resistance. New drug therapies are tested in clinical trials, then once FDA-approved, become available to the general public.