prostate-report.org

Researchers discover new prognosis marker for prostate cancer

Thinking related to today’s prognosis markers, one of the critical problems with prostate cancer is that about 70-80 percent of patients wind up in a group where very little can be said about their prognosis. Unfortunately, there are no methods good enough today to determine which patients truly need treatment and which ones can get along fine without the difficult treatment. By consequence, this impossibility to make the difference between aggressive and nonaggressive conditions, turns in that certain patients are over-treated with therapies that can lead to serious side effects and that other patients who really need intensive treatment do not get it or get it too late.

A recent study at Umeå University, Sweden, suggests that measuring levels of the active form of the protein EGFR in the tumor and its vicinity can provide a more reliable prognosis for individuals with prostate cancer.

The study findings, recently published in the scientific journal Clinical Cancer Research, claim that the EGFR protein was shown to provide information about the aggressiveness of the tumor, both when it is measured in the tumor or in the healthy tissue surrounding the tumor.