Prostate cancer risk assessment model: a scoring model based on the Swedish Family-Cancer Database

Prostate cancer is the most common cancer in men and family history of cancer and age are the strongest contributing factors. We followed about 600,000 men from the Swedish Family-Cancer Database (world’s largest of its kind) for 10 years to design the Prostate Cancer Risk Assessment Model (PCRAM) for the first time, which enables clinicians to assess a man’s risk of prostate cancer based on his personal and family history of prostate, oesophagus and breast cancers. PCRAM, which was successfully tested in another large sample, also contains a chart of equivalent ages by risk score that assists health care providers to estimate when to begin prostate cancer screening individually. (By Mahdi Fallah, MD, PhD, http://jmg.bmj.com/content/49/5/345 )