Abstract
Prostate cancer is one of the most common tumor diseases worldwide. Often being non-aggressive, prostate tumors in these cases do not need immediate treatment. However, about 20% of diagnosed prostate cancers tend to metastasize and require treatment. Existing diagnostic methods may fail to accurately recognize the transition of a dormant, non-aggressive tumor into highly malignant prostate cancer. Therefore, new diagnostic tools are needed to improve diagnosis and therapy of prostate carcinoma. This review evaluates existing methods to diagnose prostate carcinoma, such as the biochemical marker prostate-specific antigen (PSA), but also discusses the possibility to use the altered expression of integrins and laminin-332 in prostate carcinomas as diagnostic tools and therapeutic targets of prostate cancer.
Highlights
Prostate cancer is one of the most common tumor diseases worldwide
Despite the fact that prostate-specific antigen (PSA) screening can be helpful in Prostate carcinoma (PC) diagnostics, it is not sufficient to recognize all cases of the disease and in most cases it must be assisted by additional, non-invasive tests, such as digital rectal examination, transrectal ultrasound examination, and histological analyses of biopsies
Laminin-332 may support migration and invasion of carcinoma cells [24,25]. This discrepancy might be explained by the fact that laminin-332 is processed by different proteases which are expressed in varying amounts by carcinoma cells
Summary
Prostate carcinoma (PC) is one of the most frequent cancers diagnosed in men worldwide. The nature of this phenomenon is still poorly understood It is discussed whether a specific extracellular microenvironment within these organs provides an appropriate substratum to which PC metastatic cells adhere to, and whether PC cells develop the features mimicking osteoblasts [3,4]. It is possible that PC may originate from both luminal and basal cells Once awakened from their dormant form, malignant cells of PC are highly aggressive and need to be treated. The total number of diagnosed PCs has dramatically increased over the last 20 years, whereas associated mortality did not change significantly This discrepancy can be explained by the fact that new diagnostic methods allowed the detection of PCs at very early and curable stages, which had not been possible before. Biochemical monitoring of prostate-specific antigen (PSA), together with digital rectal examination and invasive biopsy are the main tools to diagnose PC nowadays
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