A New Kind of Calculator

Watch this week’s video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=399TSClQMOU

In my house, as likely in many others, my husband and I split the duties. Not only does it lighten the load, but it’s also the perfect way to weasel out of tasks I hate. I get the bathrooms and John gets the bills, and that’s a good thing, considering I never had a mind for numbers. I always excused my mathematical shortfalls by arguing, “That’s what calculators are for!” So you can imagine my delight when I learned that a new type of calculator was not only validating my love of the tool in general, but helping men spot a potential killer.

Here at Sunnybrook, Dr. Robert Nam is a real dynamo. Not only is he one of the country’s top uro-oncologists and surgeons, but he’s also a brilliant researcher. For the past few years, he’s been developing Sunnybrook’s Prostate Cancer Risk Calculator, which is really a fancy way of describing a simple checklist men can fill out with their family doctors. It considers things like a man’s age, ethnicity, family history of prostate cancer and their PSA score. “It instantly gives you your risk for having prostate cancer or aggressive prostate cancer,” Dr. Nam told me. “And you can use that data to determine if you need a biopsy or not. It was started because we realized PSA was a terrible test to evaluate men for prostate cancer,” he said, referring to the imprecise nature of the measurement.

Dr. Nam hopes men will use this new calculator as a way of taking charge of their screening, knowing it will spare many from unnecessary biopsies and stress. This all goes hand in hand with Sunnybrook’s Rapid Results Clinic, which cuts down on the time from biopsy to results from about 3 weeks, to just 72 hours. While it is a lot for men to process in such a short time, I believe there’s something to be said for getting through painful experiences as quickly as possible.

This calculator is intended for men over the age of 50. But if a man has a family history of prostate cancer, Dr. Nam says filling it out earlier, around 40 or 45, is a good idea. “Go to your family physician and say, I want to be evaluated for my risk for having prostate cancer, or aggressive prostate cancer, which is the key.” It’s not a perfect tool, but Dr. Nam says it’s most effective at identifying men with very aggressive prostate cancer, and particularly those with normal PSA levels, as those are the men who often fall through the cracks.

Dr. Nam’s vision for the calculator is that it be globally adopted to better select men for prostate cancer biopsy and screening. More immediately, he says it’s about raising awareness among family doctors and their male patients. Personally, I always found calculators to be lifesaving. Now at Sunnybrook, they really are!