Monday 11 January 2010

Prostate Cancer Tests: Are False Positives Worth It?

According to the BBC, one in eight men will test positive for prostate cancer when they do not have the disease. I believe this to be an astonishingly high figure and cannot believe that this has gone undetected for years. The obvious solution to the problem would be to spend money on research and find more accurate tests, however, I would recommend to any government that sees these figures to raise awareness about the false positives and to maybe give patients two tests rather than one. This would hopefully eradicate at least some of the false positives.
Perhaps more worryingly, once given a false positive, these patients will undergo, sometimes, extreme invasive surgery. Due to the age of most of the men who develop this cancer, surgery can, as always, be fatal, therefore pushing the eradication of false positives to a new level of importance.
Hopefully in the near future a new test will be discovered and the only way that this will happen is if charities such as Cancer Research UK and companies that develop these tests put some funding and receive donations.