Thoughts..??

The lowest that the Labcorp uPSA can detect is 0.006. Keep in mind that a blank with no PSA whatsoever does not return a zero with this assay, but rather some number up to a small positive value (called the Limit of Blank), so even your result of 0.007 may not consist entirely of your own PSA! It's safe to say that you most likely have no prostate cells (healthy or malignant) putting out an PSA!

Personally, I would treat all readings up to about 0.010 as "essentially zero" with this Labcorp test.

Djin

Cleveland Clinic considers anything lower than .013 to be undetectable.

mattam said...
My understanding is that Mayo believes there is no need to test PSA below 0.1. They seem to have a good reputation. 🙂

This would certainly be the case for someone who has had RT as their primary threatment, because you're not going to be able to diagnose a recurrence until about the Phoenix definition of nadir + 2.0 In this case, since NorCal had an RP followed by SRT, you expect the PSA to be low, so you can have a heads-up by tracking with a uPSA test. Further radiation to the pelvis is unlikely, and you'd need the PSA to be high enough to make a PSMA scan worthwhile, but we all have different comfort levels. I'm not sure at what PSA an M.O. would advise restarting ADT, but knowing from what point the patient began an upward PSA trend may be of help in planning a trigger PSA value.

Djin

Post Edited (DjinTonic) : 2/22/2023 1:43:39 PM (GMT-8)