Today, March 3, the American Cancer Society released an update of its guidelines for the early detection of prostate cancer. A San Antonio physician, Ian M. Thompson, Jr., M.D., interim executive director of the Cancer Therapy & Research Center at the UT Health Science Center, was one of a dozen scientists nationally to author the guideline.
While Dr. Thompson is out of the country this week, one of his colleagues from the CTRC at the UT Health Science Center is available today for interviews. To schedule an interview, please contact me at the telephone numbers above or email me at stamm@uthscsa.edu.
If you have not received a release from the American Cancer Society about the guidelines, you can download a copy from their Web site: http://www.cancer.org/ Go to ACS News Center.
The guideline promotes the use of decision aids to help men decide whether to get screened. The Health Science Center helped develop The Cancer Risk Calculator for Prostate Cancer, based upon the 18,800 men in the Prostate Cancer Prevention Trial, which was led by Dr. Thompson. The risk calculator can be accessed at the following Web site: http://deb.uthscsa.edu/URORiskCalc/Pages/uroriskcalc.jsp and our faculty expert can discuss it with you. A few points of interest:
• The calculator has been validated in multiple populations around the U.S. and is currently used by many universities and health systems to help their physicians and patients understand their individual risk of not just prostate cancer but their risk of aggressive (high-grade) cancer.
• The current version reflects the continuing research efforts here at the UT Health Science Center and now includes PCA3, a urine-based genetic screening test as well as Body Mass Index. PCA3 is a gene that is more common in prostate cancer and detected in the urine.
• Our research efforts have found (and have been confirmed by others) that in overweight and obese men, PSA is lower, leading to a delay in diagnosis. The updated risk calculator takes this variable into account. A comprehensive discussion of screening, prostate cancer prevention, and treatment can be found at the CTRC prostate cancer web site (http://www.ctrc.net/ADAM/prostatecancer.cfm?fne=1721).
The Cancer Therapy & Research Center at The University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio is one of the nation’s leading academic research and treatment centers, serving more than 4.4 million people in the high-growth corridor of Central and South Texas including Austin, San Antonio, Laredo and the Rio Grande Valley. CTRC is one of the elite cancer centers in the country to be named a National Cancer Institute-designated Cancer Center, and is one of the only three in Texas. A world leader in developing new drugs to treat cancer, the CTRC Institute for Drug Development is internationally recognized for conducting one of the largest oncology Phase I clinical drug programs in the world, and participates in the clinical and/or preclinical development of many of the cancer drugs approved by the U.S. Food & Drug Administration. For more information, visit www.ctrc.net