Prostate cancer is one of the primary health scares for aging men, but thankfully, improved testing could soon be on the way. A simple spit test that can be taken at home is among the most promising methods for detecting prostate cancer, which an estimated 1 in 8 men are diagnosed with during their lifetime.
In an April 2025 study published in the New England Journal of Medicine, researchers demonstrated the success of calculating prostate cancer risk from saliva. The study showed that a spit test can identify prostate cancer more accurately than prostate-specific antigen (PSA) tests, which have come under scrutiny for their tendency to produce unreliable results.
The study assessed 6,142 European men between the ages of 55 and 69, extracting germline DNA from their saliva. Using the saliva, researchers were able to find a polygenic risk score (PRS); this metric denotes someone’s risk of developing a disease ...
