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By Nancy Lapid
April 18 (Reuters) - Hello Health Rounds Readers! Today we bring news of potentially promising advances in diagnostics and treatment. One is an experimental long-lasting, injectable drug for people with hard-to-control high blood pressure. The other is a urine test for detecting prostate cancer that may reduce the need for biopsies.
Health Rounds will be off next Tuesday and return with the latest cutting edge medical science on Thursday.
Urine test identifies worrisome prostate cancers
A new urine test detects prostate cancer in need of treatment more accurately than standard blood tests and reduces unnecessary biopsies, researchers reported on Thursday in JAMA Oncology.
Because some prostate cancers do not require treatment and can be safely monitored, the test was developed to find the higher-grade, “clinically significant” cancers in need of early detection and treatment.
The test, MyProstateScore 2.0 (MPS2) from Ann Arbor, Michigan-based LynxDx, measures 18 genes associated with prostate cancer.
The study looked at 743 men with blood tests showing elevated prostate specific antigen $(PSA)$ levels, which can indicate the presence of cancer.
The use of MPS2 would have avoided 35% to 42% of unnecessary biopsies - invasive tests that proved negative or found low-grade cancers not requiring treatment - without a decrease in diagnoses of clinically significant cancer, the researchers reported.
By comparison, existing biomarker tests could have avoided only 15% to 30% of unnecessary biopsies, they said.
The improvement in accuracy was even more pronounced in men with a history of a previous negative biopsy, according to the report.
However, only 13% of trial participants were African American. Because prostate cancer is more common in Black men, the researchers are conducting further trials in more racially diverse populations.
Single injection eases refractory hypertension
A single injection of an experimental drug from Roche
and Alnylam Pharmaceuticals yielded lasting improvement in patients with persistent mild to moderate high blood pressure despite taking appropriate medication, according to results from a mid-stage trial.
In 672 patients with refractory hypertension, adding an under-the-skin injection of zilebesiran to existing treatment with one or two standard blood pressure medications reduced systolic blood pressure – the top number - by 4 to 12 mm Hg on average at three months.
Improvements were still evident six months after the injection, said the researchers, who presented the data at the American College of Cardiology scientific meeting in Atlanta.
The new drug works by blocking the liver’s production of the protein angiotensinogen, a key component of the renin-angiotensin system $(RAS.AU)$ that regulates blood pressure and fluid balance in the body.
Zilebesiran “may be a very potent new strategy for lowering blood pressure while reducing the need for daily pills," study leader Dr. Akshay Desai of Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston said in a statement.
(Reporting by Nancy Lapid; Editing by Bill Berkrot)
((nancy.lapid@thomsonreuters.com))
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