While information about regular screening for breast cancer for women is widely available, doctors say there is no reliable, safe and comfortable way to screen for the most common cancer for men ? prostate cancer.
However, researchers at Johns Hopkins Medical Institute in Baltimore, University of California San Francisco, and a handful of institutions around the country are making headway with a new advanced form of magnetic resonance imaging that could provide precise, accurate and easy-to-read results without painful or uncomfortable probing.
“My father?s prostate cancer was missed in one of the leading institutions in this country,” said Dr. Faina Shtern. “At that time, I was championing mammograms for women.”
Shtern, then head of diagnostic imaging for the National Cancer Institute, shifted her focus, helping found the AdMeTech Foundation, a nonprofit organization that promotes advancements in prostate health and pushs for cutting edge research into prostate screening.
“The prostate is the last organ in the human body where biopsy is conducted blind,” without advanced imaging, Shtern said.
More than 230,000 new cases of prostate cancer were detected in 2004, and nearly 30,000 men died of the disease that year, according to the National Cancer Society. In that same year, Shtern said, 1.2 million men had a biopsy ? a tissue sample cut from the prostate ? after which doctors determined there was no cancer present.
In most cases, doctors still use ultrasound, but only to guide the biopsy needle. The grainy black and white images are not precise or sensitive enough to identify cancerous tissue, Shtern said. Even conventional MRI can only give a good guess about cancerous growth but cannot tell doctors if the cancer has begun to spread to other parts of the body.
Johns Hopkins is one of the few research institutions working with the next generation “high field” MRI scanners, said spokesman Gary Stephenson.
These machines produce images that make prostate cancer obvious and clearly indicate whether the cancer can be cut out or whether it has spread to other parts of the body, in which case chemotherapy is needed.
At present, the machines and the process are too expensive for common use and haven?t been medically proven.
AdMeTech estimates $3.5 billion could be saved if noninvasive imaging technologies replaced just a fraction of blind biopsies.
