Abstract
Early diagnosis of prostate cancer (PCa) in an organ-confined stage following radical treatment is the only potential curative approach in PCa. Prostatic-specific antigen (PSA) is very helpful in early diagnosis, but the main disadvantage is that it has a low positive predictive value in the range of the grey zone of 2.5-10 ng/mL.
For this reason, new tests with better parameters are needed. One promising test is that for differential display code 3 (DD3(PCA3)), which is a prostate-specific non-coding mRNA that is highly overexpressed in prostate tumor cells.
A total of 186 patients were examined. In a group of patients with suspected PCa, one tissue specimen core was collected for testing DD3(PCA3) expression.
The total RNA was isolated and DD3(PCA3) and PSA expressions were quantified using quantitative RT real-time PCR method. It was found that the levels of the mRNA expression of DD3(PCA3) were significantly higher (p<0.045) in patients with PCa than in patients with benign prostatic hyperplasia.