By Connor Boyd For Mailonline
Published: 00:01 BST, 26 June 2019 | Updated: 00:01 BST, 26 June 2019
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Thousands of men with prostate cancer may be spared painful treatments thanks to a new urine test, scientists say.
A trial of the experimental test showed it can spot the killer disease five years earlier than current methods.
Researchers discovered it can also accurately predict whether patients will require treatment in the first five years of diagnosis.
Prostate cancer is the most common cancer in men in the UK, with 47,000 men being diagnosed each year.
It usually develops slowly and the majority of cancers will not require treatment in a man's lifetime.
But doctors currently struggle to distinguish between aggressive and less serious tumours, making it hard to decide on treatment.
Active surveillance is a way of monitoring low-risk, localised prostate cancer using blood tests and scans every few months (file image)
Aggressive forms of the disease require rapid treatment, but low-risk patients often do not need any treatment at all.
Experts hope the test could help men avoid unnecessary biopsies and repeated invasive follow-ups for 'low risk' patients.
The test, called PUR (Prostate Urine Risk), works by looking at genetic information stored within urine.
A computer algorithm then identifies a combination of 35 genes that indicate how severe a patient's cancer might be.
It was developed by a team of researchers at the University of East Anglia (UEA) and the Norfolk and Norwich University Hospital (NNUH).
They analysed urine samples from 535 men to create the test before trialling it on 250 patients.
The results of the test were published today in the British Journal of Urology (BJU) International.
Radiotherapy, while effective, is known to cause nausea, fatigue, erectile dysfunction and incontinence.
Surgery to remove the prostate gland is painful and
