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Updated: Aug 18, 2026
Microarray-based Identification of Individual HERV Loci Expression: Application to Biomarker Discovery in Prostate Cancer
Published on: November 3, 2013
Comparison of different prostate-specific antigen cutpoints for early detection of prostate cancer: results of a
A Reissigl1, J Pointner, W Horninger
1Department of Urology, University of Innsbruck, Austria.
Objectives:
This study was designed to compare the usefulness of the normal prostate-specific antigen (PSA) level and the age-referenced PSA level in a large screening study for early detection of prostate cancer.
Methods:
A total of 21,078 subjects (aged 45 to 75 years) were participants in a 1-year prostate cancer screening project with PSA as the initial test. Of the volunteers, 1618 (8%) showed an elevated PSA level according to age-specific reference ranges, and using the normal PSA cutoff point (4.0 ng/mL), 1872 (9%) had elevated PSA levels between 4.0 and 6.5 ng/mL.
Results:
Biopsies in both groups were performed if the PSA level was elevated. We evaluated the effect on biopsy rate and cancer detection. A PSA cutoff point of 2.5 ng/mL in men 45 to 49 years old and a PSA cutoff point of 3.5 ng/mL in men 50 to 59 years old with normal digital rectal examination findings resulted in an 8% increase in the number of biopsies (66 of 778) and an 8% increase in organ-confined cancer detection. An increasing cutoff of 4.5 ng/mL in men 60 to 69 years old and 6.5 ng/mL in men 70 to 75 years old resulted in 21% fewer biopsies (205 of 983) and would have missed 4% of organ-confined tumors (8 of 220).
Conclusions:
We conclude that the use of PSA age-specific reference ranges increases the detection of clinically important and organ-confined cancers in young men and decreases the number of biopsies in older men.
