The Nation - News from Dec. 4, 1986

Prostate cancer attacks 30% of all men over 50 and kills 25,000 a year, but a new diagnostic technique can detect tumors in an early, curable stage, a researcher reported. Ultrasound scans, which use reflected sound waves to provide a visual image of internal organs, may eventually prove a valuable screening tool for the cancer, offering a vast improvement over current techniques that are “no better than flipping a coin,” Dr. Fred Lee, a radiologist from St. Joseph Mercy Hospital in Ann Arbor, Mich., told a meeting of the Radiological Society of North America in Chicago.