With Urine,You Can Predict Your Risk Prostate Cancer

With Urine,You Can Predict Your Risk Prostate Cancer

It may soon be possible to predict your risk of aggressive prostate cancer if you simply pee and submit the sample of your urine for a special test.

This is possible thanks to a new experimental urine test which shows whether a man would need treatment and when he would for prostate cancer.

This new test is the result of efforts by researchers at the University of East Anglia and the Norfolk and Norwich University Hospital (NNUH) who collaborated to develop a urine test to diagnose aggressive prostate cancer and predict whether patients will require treatment up to five years earlier than standard clinical methods require.

The experimental new test called ‘PUR’ (Prostate Urine Risk) also identifies men who are up to eight times less likely to need treatment within five years of diagnosis.

The test could help large numbers of men avoid an unnecessary initial biopsy and repeated invasive follow-ups for ‘low risk’ patients on active surveillance. Prostate cancer is the most common cancer in men and the second most common tumour diagnosed worldwide.

The prostate is part of the male reproductive system and makes some of the fluid that nourishes and protects sperm cells in the semen. Prostate cancer is to men what breast cancer or cervical cancer is to women. It has the potential to grow and spread quickly, but for most men, it is a relatively slow growing disease.

About 20,000 men die of prostate cancer every year in Nigeria. One new case occurs every 3.3 minutes and a man dies from prostate cancer every 20 minutes. On daily basis, at least 14 men die in the country and 1 in 5 men will be diagnosed with prostate cancer in their lifetime. A black man is 70 percent more likely to develop prostate cancer than a Caucasian man, and is nearly 2.3 times more likely to die from the disease.

The latest research entitled “A Four Group Urine Risk Classifier for Predicting Outcome in Prostate Cancer Patient” is published in the journal BJU International. The research team was led by Prof Colin Cooper, Dr Daniel Brewer and Dr Jeremy Clark, all from UEA’s Norwich Medical School, with the support and expertise of Rob Mills, Marcel Hanna and Prof Richard Ball at the NNUH.

They developed the Prostate Urine Risk (PUR) test using machine learning to look at gene expression in urine from samples collected from 537 men.