Prostate-specific antigen for prediction of skeletal metastases on bone scintigraphy in prostate cancer

Abstract

We read with great interest the article by Manohar et al. [1] in the July-September 2020 edition of the journal. They conducted a retrospective analysis of medical records on 307 prostate cancer patients referred for 99m Tc methylene diphosphonate ( 99m Tc MDP) bone scintigraphy in a nuclear medicine department in India and used receiver operator curve analysis to determine the optimal prostate-specific antigen (PSA) cutoff values for predicting skeletal metastases. The authors reported that the optimal cutoff value of serum PSA in the prediction of positive bone scan for skeletal metastases was 29.16 ng/ml, with a sensitivity and specificity of 89.0% and 74.6%, respectively. They reviewed similar studies on the subject from different settings which showed that the PSA cutoff for bone scintigraphy ranged from 10 to >30 ng/ml. [1]