An analysis of three different prostate cancer risk calculators applied prior to prostate biopsy: A Turkish cohort validation study

Abstract

The study aimed to investigate the best‐performing of three risk calculators (RCs) for the Turkish population in predicting cancer‐free status and high‐risk prostate cancer (PCa) in patients undergoing transrectal ultrasound‐guided prostate biopsy. The electronic medical records of 527 patients who underwent prostate biopsy for the first time due to PSA of 0.3–50 ng/dl and/or cancer suspicion at digital rectal examination (DRE) between January 2017 and December 2020 were retrieved retrospectively. The predictive power of the RCs in the biopsy and the surgical cohort was calculated by two urologists using European Randomised Study of Screening for Prostate Cancer (ERSPC) RC, the North American Prostate Cancer Prevention Trial‐RC (PCPT‐RC), and the Prostate Biopsy Collaborative Group (PBCG)‐RC. All three RCs were successful in predicting PCa and high‐risk disease at ROC analysis (p < 0.0001). Of these three nomograms, PBCG‐RC outperformed PCPT‐RC 2.0 and ERSPC‐RH in predicting benign pathology outcomes at biopsy. A better performance of PBCG‐RC was also observed in terms of prediction of high‐risk disease at biopsy. Using any of the available RCs prior to biopsy is of greater assistance to prostate‐specific antigen and DRE than examination alone. The study results show that PBCG‐RC performed before biopsy has a higher predictive power than the other two RCs.

Accommodating heterogeneous missing data patterns for prostate cancer risk prediction

“…We compared six methods that have been proposed for handling missing data with the objective of finding the method most likely to perform well in multiple external validation studies of a globally accessible online risk tool. As with all online risk tools, online publication of the original PBCG continues to result in published external validation studies providing evidence for or against its generalizability to other populations, particularly in comparison to other published tools [4,[21][22][23][24][25][26]. To date, by exclusion of prostate volume, the original PBCG tool has competed less favorably with the other tools incorporating this information.…”

Globally accessible end-user-friendly prostate cancer risk prediction tools based on contemporary cohorts with heterogeneous missing risk factors

“…We compared six methods that have been proposed for handling missing data with the objective of nding the method most likely to perform well in multiple external validation studies of a globally accessible online risk tool. As with all online risk tools, online publication of the original PBCG continues to result in published external validation studies providing evidence for or against its generalizability to other populations, particularly in comparison to other published tools [21,22,23,24,25,26,27]. To date, by exclusion of prostate volume, the original PBCG tool has competed less favorably with the other tools incorporating this information.…”

ZNF692 promotes cell proliferation, invasion and migration of human prostate cancer cells by targeting the EMT signaling pathway

“…Therefore, when an elevated PSA is found during PCa screening, a prostate biopsy is often performed for further diagnosis. Prostate biopsy is still the gold standard for PCa diagnosis [ 6 ]. Early PCa is an indolent tumor.…”