The 1 Thing To Remember About Your PSA Results During Prostate Cancer Screening

TODAY’s Never Have I Ever series offers guidance about procedures and practices our trusted health experts would never participate in. Discover why they should be avoided and which healthy practices you should turn to instead. Cancer screenings are essential to finding and diagnosing illness before symptoms begin and disease spreads. They’re especially important for certain cancers that don’t cause symptoms in the early stages. In these cases, screening can make all the difference in getting treatment as soon as possible, and prostate cancer is no exception. Should you and your doctor decide you should be screened for prostate cancer, you’ll likely get a prostate-specific antigen (PSA) test, which measures the amount of a protein called PSA found in the blood. An abnormal PSA level is typically one that’s elevated. Should your doctor find you have higher PSA levels than normal, you may be tempted to immediately link those results to a prostate cancer diagnosis. One expert says, however, that’s only the first step. Never Have I Ever: Assumed One Normal PSA Result Means I’m Done Screening “One test is not sufficient,” Dr. Firas Abdollah, urologist at Henry Ford Health, tells TODAY.com. It’s a single snapshot of someone’s overall health. Although it’s useful data, your PSA levels aren’t absolute. Instead, they’re the first clue that something might be off with your health, he explains. In fact, in rare cases, someone with prostate cancer could have normal PSA levels, while someone else might have elevated PSA levels because of a medication they’re taking, a prostate infection, a recent medical procedure or even riding a bike, without cancer being present at all. PSA levels, he explains, can also change over time. What to Do Instead A normal PSA falls between 3.5-4 nanograms per milliliter, explains Abdollah. Those with prostate cancer will typically have a PSA level above that range. If someone’s PSA is higher than 10, there’s a 50% chance they’ll have prostate cancer, according to the American Cancer Society. Only 15% of those with prostate cancer will fall below that normal range. If your PSA results are abnormal, prepare for even more screening. Because prostate cancer is a silent and slow-growing cancer, your doctor will send you to a urologist for closer inspection. “That’s most of the patients that I see in my clinic,” says Abdollah. “Most of them are a little bit surprised. They’re like, ‘I feel nothing. Nothing is wrong with me.’” “Then I explain to them that most of the time symptoms are not a good indicator of prostate cancer, and many people with prostate cancer don’t have any significant symptoms. This is why we have to depend on the screening (with) the PSA to find things early,” he adds. So, he’ll look deeper, sometimes scheduling the patient for a biopsy, during which the doctor will take a small of the prostate and look for cancer cells under a microscope. This tends to happen if the patient’s PSA is especially high. For others, he’ll schedule another PSA test, usually for the following year, to monitor any further changes before requesting a biopsy for cancer which may not be present or spreading, or may not be there at all. It all depends on the patient and their data.