Utility and limits of serum prostate specific antigen determinations in prostatic cancer staging in view of surgical treatment

We investigated the clinical value of serum prostate specific antigen in 35 patients with apparently localized prostate cancer who underwent retropubic radical prostatectomy at our Department. In this series preoperative prostate specific antigen levels tended to increase with the increasing severity of pathological stage. The positive and negative predictive values were 68.1% and 63.6% respectively, accuracy was 66.6%. In the case of lymph node involvment, PSA values were lower than 10 nanog./ml in 20% of cases. Prostate specific antigen values not useful to predict preoperatively the final pathological stage of the prostate cancer because of the wide range of values among patients within each stage.