@diverjer
A bill.

Australia just announced they will no longer do DRE‘s. Plenty of other ways to figure out whether somebody has prostate cancer.

@diverjer Not really a stupid question at all.

Pathology after my RARP showed I had a positive margin, and Prolaris Score indicated at 53% chance of a BCR in ten years. Gleason was 3+4.

At eight years after my surgery, my urologist detected a small nodule in my prostate fossa during a routine DRE, but my PSA was still undetectable (<0.1). So no further action at the time. Two years later, my PSA rose to 0.11. A PSMA PET scan was performed and the nodule lit up with a SUVmax of 13.3. A pelvic MRI further indicated that the nodule was a cancersous lesion. At that point, I was diagnosed with a local recurrence and treated with radiation therapy.

If not for the DRE, I suspect that the PET scan would not have been performed, and I would be on active surveillance at most. Instead, the palpable nodule set things in motion and I got a jump start on treating the relapse.

In my case, a DRE gave the first indication of a local relapse, two years before PSA did.

@diverjer

I thought I was done with DREs after my prostate removal.

My uro, who is very good and respected one, still performs for as in the other comment.