This Article  • Full text  • PDF  • Send to a friend  • Save in My Folder  • Save to citation manager  • Permissions  Citing Articles  • Citation map  • Citing articles on HighWire  • Contact me when this article is cited  Related Content  • Related article  • Similar articles in JAMA  Social Bookmarking   What's this?

	Since this article does not have an abstract, we have provided the first 150 words of the full text and any section headings.

To the Editor.—Dr McNaughton Collins and colleagues¹ postulate a role for serendipity in prostate cancer detection. We concur that a cancer detected based on elevated prostate-specific antigen (PSA) concentration is "serendipitous" if the diagnosis is followed by prostatectomy in which minimal (<0.5 cm³) cancer is found. However, detection of cancer after abnormal digital rectal examination (DRE) may be less serendipitous than the authors imply. Their definition is valid for DRE only if one relies on clinical incidence data since it is not also based on the "gold standard" of prostatectomy or autopsy findings. They state that in 28% of cases, cancer on quadrant needle biopsy is identified only in a site different from the abnormal DRE findings. This 28% "false-positive" rate for DRE, presumably resulting from hyperplasia or prostatitis, would probably be lower if the authors had relied on matched prostatectomies, but is inflated by the inherent high . . . [Full Text of this Article]

CiteULike    Connotea    Del.icio.us    Digg    Reddit    Technorati    Twitter     What's this?

RELATED ARTICLE

Early Detection of Prostate Cancer: Serendipity Strikes Again
Mary McNaughton Collins, David F. Ransohoff, and Michael J. Barry
JAMA. 1997;278(18):1516-1519.
ABSTRACT  

THIS ARTICLE HAS BEEN CITED BY OTHER ARTICLES

Genetics of Prostate Cancer
Zhang et al.
Clin Med Res 2003;1:21-28.
ABSTRACT | FULL TEXT