Development and validation of a nomogram to estimate the risk of prostate cancer in Brazil

To develop and validate a nomogram to estimate the probability of prostate cancer (PCa) in men undergoing opportunistic screening. This was a cross-sectional observational study on a cohort of men screened for PCa at the Barretos Cancer Hospital (BCH) between January 2004 and December 2007. Patients' data were collected from their charts and binary logistic regression analyses were performed to assess the power of various factor combinations as predictors of the PCa risk. Out of the 1,313 screened men who underwent prostate biopsy, 553 (42.1%) had histopathological confirmation of PCa. The logistic regression analyses provided an area under the receiver operating characteristics (ROC) curve (AUC) of 0.737 (95% confidence interval (CI)=0.678-0.796) for the best predictor combination. A nomogram was constructed to estimate the individual risk for PCa prior to biopsy. Our nomogram provides an easy and practical method, superior in performance to the traditional criteria, predicting the diagnosis of PCa with a reasonable accuracy.