Description: TUESDAY, Oct. 2 (HealthDay News) -- Adding an extra step to the standard test for prostate cancer might improve treatment for some men, a new study finds.

Doctors now use what's known as the Gleason test -- named for the physician who developed it -- as a major tool in judging how aggressively a prostate cancer should be treated, explained lead researcher Dr. Abhijit A. Patel, a radiation oncologist at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston.

His team published its findings in the Oct. 3 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association.

In the Gleason test, doctors take a biopsy of the cancer and look at the level of disorder displayed by cells in the two largest sections of the sample -- scoring them from 1 (less disorderly) to 5 (more disorderly).

"The less it looks like normal tissue, the more aggressive [the cancer] is," Patel explained. They then add up the two numbers to arrive at a Gleason score. A score of 7 calls for treatment such as radiation therapy, Pate