Too many men are getting the all-clear for prostate cancer when in fact they have the disease, say doctors, who are calling for an overhaul of testing techniques.
Professor Stephen Langley, a prostate cancer expert, blames the misdiagnoses on inaccurate biopsies.
Under current guidelines from NICE (National Institute for Health and Care Excellence), men with abnormally high levels of prostate specific antigen (PSA), a protein produced by the prostate gland, should be offered a test called trans-rectal ultrasound (TRUS) biopsy. Here, doctors take tissue samples by passing special needles via a probe in the rectum.
