Essential Prostate Screen

Service Description

The PSA Blood Test includes an initial face-to-face appointment with pre-test counselling, and performance of the PSA Blood test. Dr Kinnear will then read and interpret the result and deliver it to you directly with any advice on next steps required. Why have a PSA Test? With approximately 1 in 8 men being affected by prostate cancer, many men are choosing to be proactive about their prostate health, either by having a blood test, or by combining a blood test with an examination. What is PSA? It stands for Prostate Specific Antigen, a protein made by cells in the prostate gland in men. It's important to point out that PSA is made by healthy prostate cells as well as cancerous ones. And as men get older, many will develop an enlarged prostate which produces more PSA. So the level of PSA that's accepted as normal increases with increasing age. PSA is not a cancer test, but it can be a useful screening test to help us decide which men need further investigation, usually with an MRI scan first of all. Unfortunately, PSA isn't 100% reliable. Some men have a raised level but don't have prostate cancer. In medicine, we call this a false positive result. And around 1 in 7 men with a normal PSA level may have prostate cancer, which we call a false negative result. For this reason, I always recommend having an examination of the prostate, along with the PSA blood test, for men with symptoms, concerns or risk factors. What are the risk factors for Prostate Cancer? Approximately 1 in 8 men will get prostate cancer, but the risk is higher if you have one or more of these important risk factors: • A family history of prostate cancer, such as in your father or brother • You're aged over 50 • You're black or have mixed black ethnicity. What does a prostate examination involve? The prostate is positioned at the neck of the bladder and sits just in front of the rectum. This means a doctor can examine the prostate by inserting a gloved finger into the rectum. Although this may sound unpleasant, the examination is quick and painless, and the rectum can easily admit a gloved finger, which is much smaller than most stools which pass out from the rectum.