Word: antigenically
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...watch their patient carefully and hope to catch any recurrence in its earliest stages. Doctors have recommended that six months after the President's discharge from the hospital he should undergo another colonoscopy, a visual examination of the colon (see diagram). They will check his blood regularly for carcinoembryonic antigen, a chemical marker that may indicate the presence of cancer cells, and examine his lungs, liver and other organs by means of X rays and CAT scans...
These are confusing times for prostate-cancer patients and doctors alike. The field was rocked this summer when a study in the New England Journal of Medicine reported that the widely used PSA (prostate-specific antigen) test had a major problem: 15% of patients with scores low enough to be considered cancer free turned out to have prostate cancer, and 15% of those had aggressive, high-grade tumors. It now seems that the PSA's rate of increase over time may be a more valuable measure than the raw number itself. But doctors clearly need to develop better diagnostic tests...
Some of that resilience may be linked to human leukocyte antigen (HLA) genes, a group clustered on chromosome 6 that affects vulnerability to such autoimmune diseases as lupus, rheumatoid arthritis and multiple sclerosis. Centenarians living in Okinawa, for example, have variants of HLA that tend to protect against those diseases. Perls has found a region on chromosome 4 that centenarians and their siblings and children in the U.S. seem to have in common and that sets them apart from shorter-lived individuals. The finding has not yet been replicated by other groups, but Perls expects to publish a paper...
PROSTATE: About 75% of men in the U.S. over 50 have been screened for prostate cancer with the prostate-specific antigen (PSA) test, but the threshold level that doctors use to biopsy suspicious growths misses up to 82% of cancers. Harvard researchers reported that lowering the PSA level at which doctors recommend biopsies could double the rate at which they detect cancers...
...standard screening for prostate cancer, the prostate-specific antigen (PSA) blood test, is already controversial because early detection does not necessarily translate into saved lives. Now a study reports that the test, which recommends biopsies for men with PSA blood levels of more than 4 nanograms per milliliter, misses 82% of cancers in men under 60. Lowering the threshold for biopsy to 2.6, the study's authors suggest, would double the cancer-detection rate. Critics, however, caution that lowering the PSA threshold could result in overdiagnosis and needless anxiety...