Half-life of prostate-specific antigen after radical prostatectomy: the decisive predictor of curative treatment?

Prostate-specific antigen (PSA) half-life calculated in 51 patients subsequent to radical prostatectomy was found to identify patients with residual disease earlier and more reliably than the criterion of not achieving undetectable PSA levels postoperatively. It is proposed that residual tumor affects the half-life by contributing to the serum level of PSA. When PSA half-life was calculated solely in potentially cured patients, we found a half-life of 1.5 days being considerably shorter than in the previous reports based on patient populations regardless of the outcome of disease in the follow-up.