Serum prostate-specific antigen

Method

Total prostate-specific antigen concentration in serum by clinical immunoassay. The assay platform, and whether the value is total, free, or a free-to-total ratio, are recorded on the edge; platforms are not interchangeable without calibration to a common standard.

The method is part of the endpoint identity. Studies measuring the same quantity by a different method are held as separate endpoints.

Notes

PSA added 2026-08-23, after the span "PSA levels" was found to share no scored word with this entry. It recovers no claim today — the curcumin claim that exposed it also failed `numeric_round_trip` and stays refused — but the vocabulary gap is real, this literature almost never spells the analyte out, and it will recur on the next batch. The near-miss is CAT:outcome/prostate-volume. The two correlate and this is routinely used as a proxy for gland size, but the proxy breaks under exactly the agents these trials study: 5-alpha-reductase inhibitors roughly halve this value while reducing volume by only 20 to 25 percent, so substituting one for the other overstates the effect about two-fold. Direction of benefit is also population-bound - set here for benign prostatic hyperplasia and screening contexts; in an androgen-deprivation or testosterone trial a fall may reflect hormonal suppression rather than disease benefit, so the population belongs on the edge.