Prostate Cancer Screening Still Not Recommended for All.

[elleng]

A major European study has shown that blood test screening for prostate cancer saves lives, but doubts remain about whether the benefit is large enough to offset the harms caused by unnecessary biopsies and treatments that can render men incontinent and impotent.

The study, published today in The Lancet, found that midlife screening with the prostate-specific antigen, or PSA, screening test lowers a man’s risk of dying of the disease by 21 percent. The relative benefit sounds sizable, but it is not particularly meaningful to the average middle-age man, whose risk of dying of prostate cancer without screening is about 3 percent. Based on the benefit shown in the study, routine PSA testing would lower his lifetime cancer risk to about 2.4 percent.

Despite the fact that some men —one out of every 781 men in the screening group — were helped by PSA testing in the European study, the study authors say the finding does not support the use of widespread screening. Instead, cancer experts say, the focus should be on screening men at high risk and working to identify nonaggressive cancers so men will not be unnecessarily treated for the disease.

“We know we are finding a substantial number of cancers, in the range of 30 to 50 percent, that would never do any harm and would not lead to death’’ said the study’s lead author, the urologist Dr. Fritz H. Schröder from Erasmus University Medical Center in the Netherlands. For every 27 cancers detected by PSA screening, only one man’s life would be saved.

http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/08/06/prostate-cancer-screening-still-not-recommended-for-all/?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&version=HpSum&module=second-column-region&region=top-news&WT.nav=top-news

[skepticscott]

1. The problem is not the screening itself

it's the idiotic overreactions to a positive result that end up making it seem better to be ignorant.

[elleng]

2. Doctors should not add to what you call 'idiotic overreactions.'

A friend recently had biopsy, due to PSA results (I think,) and is awaiting biopsy results. I may attend meeting with doc when results are in. Am curious, for my friend of course, and in light of this article.

[mopinko]

3. sorry, but i dont think the emotional "pain" of a false positive

is really worthy of consideration along side the saving of lives.
i wonder how often these side effects from biopsies really occur. i mean, in this day and age, a biopsy isnt what it used to be. should be a little bit of tissue.

same argument as mammogram. assuming that we are so wounded by a day or 2 of sweat becomes somehow comparable to actually having breast cancer is just stupid.