We Hate This!

It reminds us of our past but it is something that should be having.

Improving Prostate Cancer Screening for Transgender Women
Cedars-Sinai

Cedars-Sinai Study Finds PSA Tests May Give False Reassurance for Transgender Women on Estrogen Therapy and Could Miss Some Cancers

Transgender women are still at risk for prostate cancer. A new study led by Cedars-Sinai Cancer investigators, published in the peer-reviewed Journal of the American Medical Association, concludes that current screening guidelines could miss early-stage prostate cancer in transgender women on hormone therapy.

The prostate, a small gland that helps make semen, also produces a protein called prostate-specific antigen, or PSA. Blood levels of PSA tend to be elevated in people who have prostate cancer, and the PSA test, which measures those levels, is a common prostate cancer screening tool.

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"In the study, we used Veterans Health Administration records to identify 210 transgender women without known prostate cancer who were taking estrogen,” said Farnoosh Nik-Ahd, MD, a urology resident at the University of California, San Francisco, and first author of the study. “We found that the median PSA value, the midpoint in the range of participants, was 0.02 ng/mL, which is fiftyfold lower than PSA values reported in similar-aged cisgender men.”

This suggests that if they are taking estrogen, transgender women who develop prostate cancer wouldn’t see their PSA rise to levels that trigger additional screening until their cancer was at a later stage, making it more difficult to treat. Nik-Ahd said that patients and clinicians should be aware of this and interpret results with caution.

Many of us really don’t like this test because it reminds out that we are male bodied but it is something that we better have done yearly.

 

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I'm away this weekend to a support group camp-out at a friend's place in Vermont this weekend.