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Lawrence Professor of Chemistry David A. Evans, who teaches Chem 30, said the lecture was scheduled to insure that students are prepared for a Friday exam...
...Jersey, sponsors free prostate screenings all over the U.S. An estimated half a million American men will allow themselves to be poked, prodded and bled in hopes of being reassured of their good health or of spotting trouble before it gets serious. In addition to the rectal exam, men can undergo a new blood test that measures levels of a protein called prostate-specific antigen. If present in large quantities, PSA may signal malignancy. The goal is to detect cancer while it is still confined to the prostate and therefore more likely to be curable. Men can call the American...
...worthy as the goal may be, however, the effectiveness and value of the mass screening are matters of dispute within the medical community. One-third of the tumors picked up by the rectal exam are already inoperable. Yet the PSA blood test is also far from infallible. It misses at least 20% of malignancies and can often give an indication of cancer where none exists. Furthermore, prostate cancers are not all the same; many grow so slowly that they do not need to be treated at all. A man could easily die of something else before his prostate condition proved...
Everyone agrees that PSA tests should be given in tandem with rectal exams. But what if the tests seem to contradict each other? It is not unusual to have a PSA level in excess of four-billionths of a gram per milliliter and a rectal exam that reveals nothing. In that case, the next step might include further observation, an ultrasound exam or even a biopsy, a procedure in which bits of tissue are removed from the prostate and examined under a microscope. Should men with high PSA levels undergo expensive, anxiety-producing biopsies year after year to make sure...
...about saving a life. "Five years ago, I would not tell a man who came into my office to have a PSA test," says Dr. Perinchery Narayan, chief of urology at the Veterans Affairs Medical Center in San Francisco. "I would say, 'Let's do a digital rectal exam, and if everything's fine, we'll do another next year.' Today when any man 50 or older comes into my office, I'll sit down with him and tell him about prostate cancer and advise that he get a PSA test." For too long, there were no options left...