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      PSA Test Is Misused, Unreliable, Says the Antigen’s Discoverer

      Eric J. Topol, MD,Director, Scripps Translational Science Institute; Chief Academic Officer, Scripps Health; Professor of Genomics, The Scripps Research Institute, La Jolla, California; Editor-in-Chief, Medscape Richard J. Ablin, PhD, DSc (Hon) August 08, 2014

      PSA Screening Does Reduce Deaths, but Is Not Recommended Prostate Cancer Screening: It Ain’t Dead Yet

      In this edition of Medscape One-on-One, host and Medscape Editor-in-Chief Eric J. Topol, MD, interviews Richard J. Ablin, PhD, DSc (Hon), who first discovered prostate-specific antigen (PSA) in 1970. At the time, Dr. Ablin and colleagues were trying to identify an antigen that was specific to prostate cancer. What Dr. Ablin identified instead was that PSA was present not only in malignant prostates but also in benign prostates. He did agree, however, that elevated levels of PSA might be useful in predicting a recurrence of prostate cancer in men who were thought to be in remission.

      It was much to Dr. Ablin’s dismay that more than 2 decades later, in the mid-1990s, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved the use of PSA not only to test for recurrence of cancer, but also as a possible predictor of cancer. Since then, Dr. Ablin maintains, the United States spends billions each year administering a preventive prostate cancer screening test to men, using PSA, that produces false positives in the majority of cases. In his interview with Dr. Topol, Dr. Ablin explains why physicians and patients should proceed with caution when using PSA as a marker for preventive screening.

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