Cycling and PSA tests -- who'd have thought...

[Ron Richings]

From Paul Rothe's 'Grape Escape' newsletter.

 

 

 

MEN'S HEALTH

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ALIVE magazine, August 2008

From our readers

Dear Editor:

I'd like to share an anecdote from the front line of PSA [prostate specific antigen] testing for prostate alert. Two Novembers ago my number was up, so to speak, 7.2 one week and 6.6 the next, so I immediately checked in with the enormous urology department of Sunnybrook Hospital in Toronto (18 doctors). 

Within eight weeks I had the results of a biopsy: negative, thank goodness.  The prospect did not look good, however.  The clinic has amassed myriad statistics from many thousands of cases. For a man of around age 60 with an elevated PSA level there is a 48-percent chance that something is wrong, and a 12-percent chance that something is seriously wrong.

I got my PSA level checked six months later, and it was back down to normal: 1.5.  What was most fascinating in my case was that on my initial trip to the lab for this test, the technician saw me carrying my bicycle helmet as I entered and immediately said there was no point in doing the test, as cycling can affect the results. There is was: I had cycled to the lab both times the previous November when my test results were high!  Two months of anguished reflections on human mortality were explained in a second.

Tony Woolfson, London, Ontario