Urine Testing for Prostate Cancer

Seattle – Prostate cancer screening has routinely involved a test known as PSA, or prostate-specific antigen, that required a blood sample. Now, a better and more accurate method may become available, and it requires only a urine sample.

Sarcosine, a compound that may distinguish slow growth prostate cancers from those that may spread throughout the body and become deadly can be identified in urine samples. Sarcosine levels in the urine of men with prostate cancer have been found to be higher than in men without prostate cancer.

Even more intriguing, when benign prostate cells are exposed to sarcosine in the lab, they begin to take on the characteristics of cancerous cells. This has led researchers to believe that sarcosine may not be just a biomarker, but an actual component of the cancer. When samples were measured from men in various stages of prostate cancer and another group of men without cancer, sarcosine was not found in healthy tissue but was found in large quantities in men with localized prostate cancer and in very large quantities in men with cancer that had spread to other parts of the body.

Although advances have been made in the detection of prostate cancer between the check for lumps and the blood test, the screening is still inexact. Biopsies are still often needed to determine the exact status of cancer that is found in the prostate. With this new discovery of the possible role played by sacrosine, diagnosis and treatment may become more precise in the future.