Washington, April 30 : According to a study recently presented at the Cancer Imaging and Radiation Therapy Symposium in Atlanta, an MRI can locate prostate cancer recurrence at extremely low PSA levels.

Researchers at MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston evaluated 389 postprostatectomy patients treated between January 2004 and October 2010 to confirm the finding.

143 patients were given a pelvic MRI to determine if cancer cells were still present in the area of the surgical bed. It emerged that thirty-five patients had suspicious MRI findings suggesting local recurrence.

Twenty-six patients were then biopsied, with 23 showing cancer.

The study showed that about one-third of the patients with a biopsy-proven recurrence after suspicious MRI finding had a PSA of less than 1, with several having a PSA as low as 0.3.

It has emerged that an MRI is able to differentiate between soft tissues better than a traditional CT scan. Hence, the high rates of cancer recurrence picked up by the MRI were not surprising to researchers.

However, the low PSA levels at which the MRI could determine recurrent disease was surely surprising.

"Being able to identify such patients is beneficial, as it would be predictive of response to salvage radiation therapy," Seungtaek Choi, MD, lead author of the study and an assistant professor of radiation oncology at MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, said.

"It also may allow a radiation oncologist to treat the area of recurrent cancer to a higher radiation dose with or without hormone ablation therapy to increase the chance of cure," he added. (ANI)