IMPORTANT NEWS: PSA screening for prostate cancer on the way out

My headline opens with "IMPORTANT NEWS."  That may be an understatement!

PSA testing for prostate cancer has been a medical standard of care for over twenty years.  Rumors and recommendations about dropping prostate cancer screening as a routine medical test for men surfaced almost a year ago.  Guess this decision moves it one step closer to obsolescence:

Prostate cancer screening's false promise

By Otis W. Brawley, Special to CNN

May 22, 2012

 

(CNN) -- Should men be routinely screened for prostate cancer? This question has been asked ever since the prostate specific antigen test, or PSA, became widely available more than two decades ago.

Central to this question is another question: Does prostate cancer screening save lives?

Both questions are hard to answer. Screening clearly helps find cancer. But many of the cancers that are diagnosed and treated do not need to be. Left alone, they will not harm the patient. And some cancers go on to cause death despite treatment.

The right question really is: Does screening find some cancers that need to be cured and can be cured?

After an exhaustive process, the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force has announced its final recommendation on PSA-based prostate cancer screening. It finds that the known harms of screening outweigh the potential benefits for men who have no cancer symptoms. It notes that all screening studies have demonstrated considerable harms associated with screening, but only one major study found evidence that screening saves lives -- and that study has some internal inconsistencies. It showed screening saves lives in the Netherlands and Sweden, but not in five other European countries. Even the positive parts of that study did not show a considerable increase in lives saved...

CLICK HERE to read the rest.  Interesting stuff.  No right or wrong answer here...

Feel good and keep smiling!   Pat