PSA - creating more Patient Stress and Anxiety than usual!

30th November 2021

In the past few weeks we noticed some strangeness appearing in the PSA reports from one of our major pathology providers here in Australia. Dorevitch Pathology had started reporting PSA levels using BOTH the Siemens Atellica assay, AND the Abbott Alinity assay on the same blood sample. So patients were turning up with two PSA results for the same sample - and were these the same?? Afraid not! Sometimes the differences were huge, leading to much "Patient Stress and Anxiety".
So we decided to get some expert help, and invited Dr Alan McNeil, Chemical Pathologist at Dorevitch, to join us in studio to discuss all things to do with PSA assays. It appears that the incentive to change to the Alinity assay is due to the Atellica assay being a little less reliable below PSA levels of 0.2 (ultrasensitive PSA).
But does anyone really care about ultrasensitive PSA anymore?? Isn't adjuvant radiotherapy all but dead post-RAVES/RADICALS/GETUG??
We discuss all this with Alan, regular hosts Professor Declan Murphy and Dr Renu Eapen, and friend of the podcast Urologist Associate Professor Daniel Moon.

Or you can listen to our audio-only version here