My first PSA test after surgery

@jeffmarc It looks to me that the assay that was being used only has a <0.08 sensitivity.
@mpersonne You may want to look at ultrasensitive assays moving forward. I do with <0.02 sensitivity. There are even tests with higher sensitivity, but they have a risk of falsely detecting small positive amounts of PSA and thus creating unnecessary anxiety.

I agree with Jeff's note of caution. I also suggest you take a look at the thread "Is PSA 0.032 after radical prostatectomy a normal fluctuation?After ra?" elsewhere in today's email listing all the discussion threads. Later today, I will put more detail in that thread but the short version is if your pathology shows you have aggressive cancer (e.g., high Gleason or
Decipher score, presence of cribriform, PNI, IDC, EPE, seminal vesicle invasion, not all clean margins during surgery), then I would definitely get the ultra-sensitive test. If you are in that category, you have to be extra-vigilant about even small rises in your PSA.

@topf
While it may be true that they were limited in what they can show in a PSA test I’ve never heard of a two digit PSA not being ultra sensitive. They don’t need to put a zero after the eight.

Normal PSA tests that are not ultrasensitive only have one digit, when you have two digits It’s a lab That does ultra sensitive.

@rhilbert0
It freaked us "for a reason" and we are happy that we did uPSA since we caught BCR on time and my husband started treatment before he hit 0.2 - early salvage gives much better results than salvage above 0.2.

I would strongly advise everybody to have uPSA and especially if your Gleason was anything above 3+4 , or you had cribriform or IDC or high Decipher (for RT patients) and for RP all of the above plus if you had positive margin, EPE, ECE, or vesicle involvement.

@rhilbert0 wrote "At Mayo, anything less than .1 is called undetectable. You shouldn't get tests more sensitive than that"

This is poor advice as a blanket statement. There are many reasons why many men should be getting ultrasensitive PSA tests after RP. If you're happy with the standard test that reads down to 0.1, that's great for you. And I understand that Mayo has that as a default for resource optimization and public health reasons. But men with higher-risk pathology and higher risk for recurrence should talk with their doctors and strongly consider uPSA that reads down to 0.02 at minimum, to have earlier visibility into a rising PSA trend.

@surftohealth88
This is not the first (or second, or third) time Surf and I have been singing from the same song book:)

@jeffmarc I agree it’s confusing. Should be either « <0.08 » or « 0.080 ». I agree that if it is an actual 0.08 reading that it requires close monitoring.