Prostate-specific antigen density: the role in benign prostate hyperplasia, prostate intraepithelial neoplasm, organ-confined prostate carcinoma and advanced prostate carcinoma.

To determine the relative role of prostate-specific antigen density (PSAD) in the early detection of prostate cancer and to assess the hypothesis that PSAD offers significant advantages over prostate-specific antigen (PSA) alone in the evaluation of patients with benign (BPH), pre-malignant (PIN) and malignant prostatic diseases, we studied retrospectively 149 patients who were evaluated with either prostatic biopsies or by surgical means. Mean PSAD was calculated to be 0.1 for BPH patients; 0.09 for PIN-1 patients; 0.1 for PIN-2 patients; 0.51 for organ-confined prostatic carcinoma (CaP) patients and 1.7 for advanced CaP patients. Although we could not be able to differentiate BPH from PIN-1 and PIN-2 by using PSAD alone (p > 0.05), there were statistically significant differences between BPH versus localized CaP, PIN-2 versus localized CaP and localized CaP versus advanced CaP (p < 0.05). In conclusion we suggest that the information provided by PSAD is superior to absolute PSA values in the differentiation between BPH and CaP but PSAD was not able to add more information on differentiating BPH from pre-malignant conditions.