Doctors should consider the body weight of the patient while reading the tests for prostate cancer as obesity could considerably alter the results of these tests, a recent US study has revealed.
Obese men have more blood which lowers the concentration of antigen, a marker for the dreadful disease. This could vary test results to considerable amounts.
The study was conducted in North Carolina and published in the Journal of the American Medical Association which included 14000 patients.
Study has revealed that perhaps the reason why obese men fall victims to aggressive cancers is that the tumors go undetected in initial stages. Due to obesity, the test for prostate-specific antigen or PSA becomes notoriously unreliable. In contrast, about one-third of men showing raised PSA levels could unneccessarily undergo furthur invasive tests in a fake perception of having cancer.
Dr. Stephen Freedland, an urologist at the Duke Prostate Center says;
If body weight was not taken into account we may have been missing a large number of cancer cases every year!
he added.
How to fix it?
Men in ‘most obese’ category could have PSA concentrations as low as 21% than normal weight men.
Dr.Chris Hiley, of the Prostate Cancer Charity, said;
This has brought to light yet another drawback of being obese. PSA concentration of obese man gets diluted due to increased blood volume due to his excess weight. We now need to work out how to take this into account and correctly estimate the PSA level which is of sheer importance in diagnosis and management of prostate cancer.
She added,
This could have wider significance in interpreting blood tests for both men and women.
In UK, prostate cancers is accounted to be the cause of 13% of the total cancer deaths and is second most common type of cancer among men after lung cancer.
Source: BBC