Alberta adding access to new type of prostate cancer care

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Albertans will soon have access to a new, experimental kind of prostate cancer care.

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The provincial government is spending $3 million over two years on developing access to scans that use positron emission tomography (PET) and computerized tomography (CT) to detect prostate-specific membrane antigen (PSMA).

“It functions by creating images that use radioactive tracers to reveal tissue and organ function,” said Health Minister Adriana LaGrange in a news release Wednesday.

“It’s necessary, and it saves lives.”

She said those kinds of tests are at the clinical trial stage and are generally not routinely available in the country, although Health Canada first approved PSMA tests in the fall of 2022.

“It’s been a very effective process to discover cancers and diagnose and treat them,” she said.

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“This issue is becoming more prevalent that we needed to expand access to those clinical trials, and the only way we could do that is to add additional funds.”

Alberta’s funding will be matched by the Alberta Cancer Foundation for a total of $6 million.

LaGrange said the funding will help 2,000 Albertans access clinical trials, with the hope it will head off more serious outcomes in the future.

“If they’re able to get this early diagnosis and treatment, it perhaps eliminates other surgeries that would need to be done.”

The test cost of around $1,500 would be covered by the province, LaGrange said, adding that patients who want it would otherwise have had to go out of province.

The funding will allow for the new scans to take place at Cross Cancer Institute and Royal Alexandra Hospital in Edmonton as well as the Foothills Medical Centre in Calgary.

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It will fall to individual health care providers to determine if the new kind of care is appropriate for individual patients.

“PMSA PET scans improve our ability to diagnose advanced prostate cancer and provide patients with a new and important treatment option,” said Dean Ruether, a medical oncologist with Alberta Health Services.

Currently, prostate cancer is detected using CT and bone scans.

Health authorities say the risk for prostate cancer begins to grow at the age of 40 with one in six men in Alberta developing the disease.

Prostate cancer is the most common kind of cancer among Canadian men outside of non-melanoma skin cancers and is the third-leading cause of death from cancer in men in Canada.

On average, 76 Canadian men will be diagnosed with prostate cancer and 14 will die of the condition every day, according to the Canadian Cancer Society.

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