Study: PSA Testing Cuts Worst Prostate Cancers
Study: PSA Testing Cuts Worst Prostate Cancers
July 30, 2012 -- If it weren't for routine PSAprostate cancer screening, an extra 17,000 Americans each year would learn that they had the worst form of the disease, a new study suggests.
That kind of prostate cancer -- metastatic prostate cancer, in which the cancer spreads to the bone or other parts of the body -- is rapidly fatal, usually within two years or less.
The new study seems to make a powerful argument in favor of PSA testing. It finds that in the three years before widespread PSA testing (1983-1985), men getting their first diagnosis of prostate cancer were three times more likely to learn they had very late-stage cancer than men diagnosed in the most recent three years for which data is available (2006-2008).
"By not using PSA tests in the vast majority of men, you have to accept you are going to increase very serious metastatic disease threefold," says study leader Edward Messing, MD, chief of urology at the University of Rochester Medical Center.
In 2008, about 8,000 U.S. men were diagnosed with metastatic prostatecancer. By projecting data from the pre-PSA era forward, Messing calculates that without routine PSA tests, 25,000 men would have been diagnosed in 2008 -- an extra 17,000 cases of deadly disease.
But it's not that simple, says Barnett Kramer, MD, MPH, associate director for disease prevention at the National Institutes of Health. Studies looking back at cancer trends in a population are very unreliable when it comes to showing what caused those trends.
For example, Kramer says, what if a man got a PSA test when his prostate cancer was in the very earliest stages of metastatic disease? Microscopic cancers already have seeded his body. But he would not yet have symptoms or detectable metastatic disease, so he'd be diagnosed with earlier-stage disease. He's subtracted forever from the men whose first diagnosis was late-stage disease, even though screening could not save his life.
Messing says this misses the point of his study, which appears in the online July 30 issue of the journal Cancer.
A Visual Guide to Prostate Cancer
That kind of prostate cancer -- metastatic prostate cancer, in which the cancer spreads to the bone or other parts of the body -- is rapidly fatal, usually within two years or less.
The new study seems to make a powerful argument in favor of PSA testing. It finds that in the three years before widespread PSA testing (1983-1985), men getting their first diagnosis of prostate cancer were three times more likely to learn they had very late-stage cancer than men diagnosed in the most recent three years for which data is available (2006-2008).
"By not using PSA tests in the vast majority of men, you have to accept you are going to increase very serious metastatic disease threefold," says study leader Edward Messing, MD, chief of urology at the University of Rochester Medical Center.
In 2008, about 8,000 U.S. men were diagnosed with metastatic prostatecancer. By projecting data from the pre-PSA era forward, Messing calculates that without routine PSA tests, 25,000 men would have been diagnosed in 2008 -- an extra 17,000 cases of deadly disease.
But it's not that simple, says Barnett Kramer, MD, MPH, associate director for disease prevention at the National Institutes of Health. Studies looking back at cancer trends in a population are very unreliable when it comes to showing what caused those trends.
For example, Kramer says, what if a man got a PSA test when his prostate cancer was in the very earliest stages of metastatic disease? Microscopic cancers already have seeded his body. But he would not yet have symptoms or detectable metastatic disease, so he'd be diagnosed with earlier-stage disease. He's subtracted forever from the men whose first diagnosis was late-stage disease, even though screening could not save his life.
Messing says this misses the point of his study, which appears in the online July 30 issue of the journal Cancer.
A Visual Guide to Prostate Cancer
Source...