Can Statins ‘mislead cancer diagnosis’?
October 28th, 2008 - Posted in Drugs to Lower Cholesterol“Daily updated news on Cholesterol”—Cholesterol-lowering drugs may cause some prostate cancers to be missed by doctors, experts have warned.
A study found that men taking statins experienced a significant drop in blood levels of a prostate cancer biomarker. This could lead to misleading results from prostate specific antigen (PSA) tests carried out as part of cancer screening.
A “healthy” PSA result from a man on statins may mean that his prostate cancer goes undetected, said researchers.
Some studies have suggested that statins may protect against prostate cancer or slow progression of the disease. However, just because statins lower PSA that does not necessarily mean they have a biological effect on prostate cancer.
PSA is in any case known to be an unreliable indicator of the disease. A definitive diagnosis always requires a biopsy - removal of a tissue sample for analysis - after an abnormal PSA result.
The warning was issued by researchers led by Dr Stephen Freedland from Duke University School of Medicine in Durham, New Carolina, US.
They wrote in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute: “The PSA declines with statin use that we observed may represent objective evidence of statins influence on prostate biology in support of epidemiological studies suggesting statins reduce overall or advanced prostate cancer risk.
“More importantly, this PSA decline, if confirmed in future studies, may complicate prostate cancer screening, because cancers may be missed due to the lower PSA levels, and this fact should be kept in mind when evaluating men taking statins.”
Co-author Dr Robert Hamilton, a urologist from the University of Toronto in Canada, said: “In a good proportion of these men, the PSA levels declined sufficiently to a point where physicians might not recommend a biopsy, so it’s really important that we understand what’s at work here, so we can be sure we’re not missing cancers because of deceptively low PSA levels.”
Each year around 34,000 British men are diagnosed with prostate cancer and 10,000 die from the disease.
