PSA

[Needtofacereality]

My in-laws have a tendency to be a little dramatic and at times play the victim. FIL(late 60s) has been diagnosed with prostate cancer. They have made out it fairly serious his level is 7.4 my naive googling has led me to believe while it’s obviously not a great thing they level seem on the lower side of abnormal.

anyone with any knowledge tell me if we should be worried

PSA levels are not necessarily an indicator of the severity of the cancer- they can be but not always. Either way a cancer diagnosis is something that is very traumatic and worrying for anyone and I would suggest that they are not 'playing the victim' in this case. A bit of compassion for the in laws is necessary in this case, although I appreciate I don't know the back story.

Many prostate cancers are not particularly aggressive and are controllable with monitoring and hormone therapies etc. Sometimes they require surgeries which have risks as all surgeries do which can affect quality of life, such as incontinence or need for an indwelling catheter.

Hopefully it has been caught early.

Oh I am sympathetic and it’s worrying, they just have form for not being honest so we try to take an educated view and not necessarily jump to the worse conclusions straight away. I heard the PSA and just wondered if anyone could add to my google knowledge.

There are many more factors in prostate cancer diagnoses, the PSA is just one indicator.
Different paths of treatment depend on the combination of scores - have you looked at the Gleason score? My family member had low PSA but needed surgery as it had a high likelihood of spreading. (He's fine now, 10 years on).

Try not to judge them, it's a scary word, plus they haven't told you the full information.

This is kind of the point they haven’t told us everything so it’s really hard to know how serious it is.

you can probably tell there is a long history of lies and manipulation so it’s hard to know what to believe he doesn’t need any treatment just monitoring. I am not unsympathetic and we are been supporting it’s just history of been burnt before so try to a level response to these things