Clinical Chemistry
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Clinical Chemistry 55: 1277-1279, 2009. First published May 28, 2009; 10.1373/clinchem.2009.126870
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(Clinical Chemistry. 2009;55:1277-1279.)
© 2009 American Association for Clinical Chemistry, Inc.

Perspectives

The Search for New Prostate Cancer Biomarkers Continues

Maria Pavlou1,2 and Eleftherios P. Diamandis1,2,3,a

1 Department of Laboratory Medicine and Pathobiology, University of Toronto, ON, Canada;2 Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine, Mount Sinai Hospital, Toronto, ON, Canada; and3 Department of Clinical Biochemistry, University Health Network, Toronto, ON, Canada.

aAddress correspondence to this author at: University of Toronto, Mount Sinai Hospital and Univ Health Network 60 Murray Street, 6th Floor, Toronto, On, Canada, M5G 1X5. Fax 416-619-5521; e-mail ediamandis@mtsinai.on.ca.

The first 300 words of the full text of this article appear below.

Reports published in top-ranked scientific journals frequently draw public media attention. A recent report in Nature by a stellar group of investigators, led by Arul M. Chinnaiyan from the University of Michigan, raises hopes that their discovery may provide a better understanding of prostate cancer progression and may contribute to noninvasive detection or prognostic evaluation of prostate cancer (1). Interestingly, although the authors convey in their title that sarcosine may play a role in prostate cancer progression, published news and commentaries on this report have focused more on sarcosine’s diagnostic and prognostic potential (2)(3). Here we analyze this report in some detail and comment primarily on the potential value of sarcosine as a urinary prostate cancer diagnostic/prognostic test, a topic that should be of interest to the readers of Clinical Chemistry.

Being the most frequently diagnosed cancer in males, prostate cancer is a major health problem. Despite the fact that its mortality rate has been decreasing by about 4% per year since 1992 (4), this cancer still kills 30 000 men annually in the US alone. Prostate cancer is rather unique among solid tumors in that it presents in 2 distinct forms. One is a latent form that occurs at some time in almost half of men older than 60 years and poses no threat to the patient’s life. The second is an aggressive form that metastasizes quickly and eventually kills the patient. The disadvantages of the frequently used prostate-specific antigen (PSA) serum test are that this test detects indiscriminately both types of prostate cancer and that PSA can also be increased in nonmalignant prostatic diseases, such as benign prostatic hyperplasia and prostatitis. It is thus not surprising that by using the serum PSA test, we end up with overdiagnosis (of . . . [Full Text of this Article]






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Copyright © 2009 by the American Association for Clinical Chemistry.