About IMPACT

Prostate cancer is the second most commonly diagnosed male cancer worldwide (excluding skin cancer), and with over 650,000 diagnoses a year it accounts for a tenth of all new male cancers. It is a disease that is particularly prevalent in the western world: it will be diagnosed in almost one-fifth of US men during their lifetime, and within the European Union approximately 200,000 men are diagnosed annually.

It is already a significant public health problem, and incidence is on the increase, even allowing for the rise in number of cases detected as a result of prostate specific antigen (PSA) screening. There is an increasing awareness within the scientific community of the need to act now to decrease prostate cancer mortality, and reduce the public health burden of this disease.

IMPACT is the first study to target PSA screening at high-risk individuals with an identified genetic alteration that is thought may predispose them to develop the disease. An international collaboration involving over 20 different countries, the study aims to see if targeting screening at BRCA1 and BRCA2 carriers will lead to diagnosis of prostate cancer at an earlier age, and whether this could translate into improved survival. More information on inherited predisposition to prostate cancer and the BRCA1 and BRCA2 gene alterations is available in this section.

Since its introduction in the 1980s, the prostate specific antigen (PSA) test has become the backbone of prostate cancer screening, but it has also caused a high level of controversy. A large proportion of men who are diagnosed with prostate cancer never actually experience any clinical symptoms or a reduction in lifespan as a result of this disease, and one of the major challenges for researchers is to discover a technique to differentiate between aggressive and clinically insignificant forms of prostate cancer.

A major problem with PSA is the over-detection of latent forms of the disease, and subsequent risk of over-treatment. An additional complication is the lack of specificity of the PSA test for cancer. PSA levels can be raised above normal in men with non-cancerous enlargements of the prostate such as benign prostatic hyperplasia (BPH) and prostatitis. Also, a small percentage of prostate cancers occur without PSA levels being elevated above what is considered to be a normal level. Please read our PSA Screening section for more information.

IMPACT also aims to investigate alternative markers for prostate cancer which could replace PSA as a prostate cancer screening tool. If you would like more detailed information about IMPACT study procedures, please visit the IMPACT study section of this website.

Next Section >> Inherited predisposition to prostate cancer

български  | Română  | Français  | Polski  | Deutsch  | Magyar  | Türkçe