Development of the Kaiser Permanente Prostate Cancer Risk Calculator

Much of the controversy surrounding prostate cancer screening is due to the poor predictive value of PSA blood tests and the risks attendant to over-diagnosis. This project aims to develop a risk calculator that uses clinical variables to determine the risk of having prostate cancer, the risk of having high-grade prostate cancer (defined as Gleason scores of 7 to 10), or the risk of having an indolent prostate cancer. A retrospective cohort study of 2000 men who have undergone biopsy at Kaiser Permanente Northern California will be used to generate a predictive model, which will then be validated with data from 1000 additional patients. A detailed comparison with age-specific PSA reference ranges and an existing risk calculator from the Prostate Cancer Prevention Trial will be performed to determine the new model’s clinical utility. The Kaiser Permanente Prostate Cancer Risk Calculator will stratify patients into cancer-risk categories that will better enable both patients and physicians to more accurately determine the need for biopsy.

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