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

Rebecca Voelker
JAMA contributor

JAMA. 1998;279:1599.

	Since this article does not have an abstract, we have provided the first 136 words of the full text and any section headings.

A new study on prostate-specific antigen (PSA) testing offers some quantification of its reliability in assessing the effectiveness of chemotherapy for advanced prostate cancer.

Researchers at the University of Michigan's Comprehensive Cancer Center in Ann Arbor studied 62 patients with advanced prostate cancer who received PSA tests after undergoing 8 weeks of chemotherapy. They found that men whose PSA levels had declined at least 50% had a median survival time of 91 weeks, compared with 38 weeks for men whose PSA levels had not declined by 50% or more.

Using PSA tests as a way to gauge patients' response to cancer therapy has been controversial because of differing opinions on its validity and how to interpret test results. The Michigan researchers' study appeared in the May issue of the Journal of Clinical Oncology.

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