PSA Rate of Change
 

 

PSA Testing: Rate of Change is Better than a Magic Number

Urologist H. Ballentine Carter, M.D., is startled by the results of his own research. Carter and Patrick C. Walsh, M.D., together with investigators at the Baltimore Longitudinal Study of Aging (BLSA), pioneered the idea of PSA velocity — the rate at which PSA increases over time — as a way of predicting whether a man has prostate cancer.


For as long as PSA has been in widespread use as an early detection tool for prostate cancer, Carter, The Peter Jay Sharp Foundation Scholar, has worried about the numbers. Nearly two decades ago, he cautioned (and we reported it, in Prostate Cancer Update, the predecessor of Discovery) that there were risks to locking into specific cutoff numbers. Back then, the general belief was that a prostate biopsy should be performed if a man’s PSA reached the ”magic number“ of 4 ng/ml.

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